In the Dust
by crinklescofftrip
Summary: Please note rating: M! Sasuke set his life on one goal, after that goal is over he is left with one question: Now what? Maybe find out just who it was he killed? KisaIta No, really!
1. Chapter 1

_Throughout Sasuke's life, there was only one thing that never changed. He never stopped loving the thrill of fighting against an unpredictable opponent. As a Genin, he had the benefit of having his most formidable, and most unexpected, challenge sorted into his own team. Naruto. _

_He could hear his own breath coming out in labored pants as he dated into the trees nearest him. At times, he thought he could feel the chakra pumping in his veins along with the blood, as he dodged, lunged, and molded, always with the knowledge that his opponent would not go down any more willingly that he would himself. It was always a fight until the other fell to the ground in exhaustion. Sasuke never hesitated about using his Sharingan during them, knowing that if his dobe of a teammate had half a chance, he would use whatever advantages he possessed if it meant being the one left standing at the end. _

_Eyes flashing, he checked the area around him, scouting out any signs of movement in the trees around him, or looking for a patch of color that would distinctly not belong in the foliage. Naruto's skills had improved since they became teammates, but he still had one fatal flaw: his astonishing talent for noise. A crash from behind had Sasuke whirling around, already pouncing from his branch to tackle the orange form behind him in midair. _

_They hit the ground together, the blond landing under him. Another body launched itself at them from behind, and Sasuke had to draw back enough to stab a kunai into its stomach before its weight could unseat him from his perch. But the few seconds it took to make the third form disappear in a puff of lavender smoke and released chakra, his teammate had managed to hoist himself up enough to throw his body against Sasuke's. Naruto revered their positions, Sasuke's midsection squeezed tightly between the leaf-strewn ground and his teammate's knee. A kunai tried to station itself near the Uchiha's throat, but Sasuke refused to lay still. The tip of his own weapon found its place in the hollow of Naruto's tanned throat at the same time one pressed against his own. Blue eyes met red, trying to stare one another down before the grudging admittance of the tie entered both their eyes - Sasuke's first, then the thick-headed blonde's. They kept their weapons in place for a while longer, as if the winner could be determined by whoever reached to what they both knew first. _

_Growling, "Sasuke-teme. . ."_

Sasuke's eyes blinked open reluctantly in the dimness of a cold pre-dawn hour. Under the blankets, his leadened body refused the idea of moving out from under the bedclothes, and as the dark shapes of the furniture in the room around him began to come into focus, he inwardly grumbled at the strict consistency of his internal clock.

There use to be a fleeting moment of unease whenever he opened his eyes to find himself in the unfamiliar room that was steadily becoming more familiar, just as he once felt when left the Leaf for the Sound. Just like it had in the other case, time was forcing the unease out of him and replacing it with a weary sense of acceptance. In the early days, when he would wake up tense and wary, his body would only slowly relax with the knowledge that Orochimaru would not be summoning him for morning training, sooth with the memory of nearly three months, and a successful, unsatisfying murder.

His eyes looked around the that wasn't his, taking in the images of the furniture that he had never owned. It had all been inherited, the legacy of a dead man who he now pretended to be, and a sick obsession that was slowly coming to be his.

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Most people have a high opinion of planning. It's possible that they really believe by simply saying what they are going to do with their lives, they can somehow predict how fate will treat them. Most plans don't work out as they are intended, or they are discarded with time. But then there are some people who honestly do live out their plans. Their goals. Perhaps that's why the smartest of them die in the fulfillment of these ambitions, so that afterward they wont see how they wither away without whatever gave their lives substance. After their lives become meaningless.

Sasuke had hung his life on a goal since the age of eight. At some point, though he couldn't recall exactly when, the notion had entered his mind that somehow in the destroying of an idol he could not completely shake free of his admiration, he would also be consumed. It had been that thought, along with others, that had given him the will to submit to whatever trials that were his way in the drive to become stronger. From turning away from the heart-softening comfort of would-be sympathizers at his family's gravesite, to eventually swearing away his body in return for the favors of a snake allied sannin.

Though his promise was never fulfilled, due to the very person that he had sworn to kill. And when that person was in turn killed, the satisfaction that Sasuke had so long imagined evaded him. Possibly, it was because after eleven years of training in total from the time he swore revenge by his parents' grave to the day that the deed was committed, the actual showdown had take less than two hours. Or it might have been for the fact that Itachi's death had been caused not by any form of Sharingan technique, or even the chidori, but by a simple, straight cut across an elegant throat.

When Itachi died, it was with his deadly eyes darting to the side, seeing Sasuke's face but remaining as unreadable as ever. . . right up to the moment that the three pupils of the Sharingan moved to perform their very last attack on the little boy what had been so easily tossed aside before.

Sasuke had been unsuspecting of the attack. If he were totally honest with himself, he had still been staring at the liquid red line that had followed his knife across Itachi's throat, blinking in amazement as it grew wider, spilling the lifeblood of the one person he hated most into the open air. The opening that he had used to attack had been so simple that he really had thought Itachi would block him. During their fight, the most extreme damage that the younger Uchiha had managed to leave on his brother's person had been by accident; a swipe at his brother's chest that had been rather gracelessly intercepted, resulting in the severing of the last two fingers on Itachi's left hand. A clean cut that might not have been noticed at first, had the sunlight not glinted off a thin ring of metal on one finger. Foolishly, Itachi's head had turned toward the shine, just for a spilt second that was long enough for his foolish little brother to dart forward and rake a kunai across the exposed throat. When it was over, and Itachi's attack had seized him, Sasuke had fallen forward, knocking into Itachi and sending them both to the ground. Sasuke was fairly certain tat Itachi was already dead by then. Feeling the warmth seeping out of his brother's body, which remained unmoving and stiff under his, was the last thing that Sasuke felt before he succumbed to the Mangekyou Sharingan, and the nightmare that Itachi had left for him.

He was sure that when they were discovered later, their bodies had not moved. The only thing that might have changed was that Itachi's blood may have begun crusting over in the noonday sun, or Sasuke's drool may have pooled on his brother's chest. Sasuke himself didn't wake up until nearly a week later. During that time, he passed in and out of dreams that he originally thought were the last remains of the Mangekyou attack, but later decided were a diluted mix of dream and memory. Images stuck in his mind, like a smoldering fire reaching up into the night sky, and a tall dark figure standing beside it, feeding a wrapped body to the flames. Another was the image of a cloudy blue sky above his head, slowly moving by as he was carried in someone's arms, limp and defenseless as a doll made of rags. But his clearest dream involved getting up from a bedroll that smelled too much like someone else, as if it had been used by someone who traveled often with distinct taste in shampoo and after shave, and walking between the trees to find water in a forest that couldn't seem to stop spinning. The dream ended with Sasuke shaking from cold in a stranger's arms again, and being unceremoniously dropped on the ground while someone jerked off his damp clothes and rubbed his freezing body dry with a towel. Toward the end of the dream, when Sasuke was just drifting off into the blackness that separated one fuzzy vision from the next, he heard the man that had brought him back saying to himself, "For the love of Kami, next time I see one of your family members pass out in a lake, I'm _letting _them drown."

When Sasuke came out of his jutsu-induced state, it was with short periods of rising to normalcy. First at meal times, when he became aware of the taste of food in his mouth, and fingers that stroked his throat until it went down. Then came the awareness of being held while he was fed, and the ridiculous struggle for the other person to pry his clenched teeth apart long enough to get the food inside. After one encounter, when Sasuke sat mutely in his mind, unable to help with the battle to get substance past his stubbornly closed jaws, he was even able to hear the sound of the porridge bowl being lowered, and the muttered, "I'm getting too fucking old for this" that followed.

From there, Sasuke's awareness increased to hearing the man's voice, and later other things around him. The moment that he regained full consciousness was when he felt himself being picked up and arrange in the position that had his head angled upward to avoid choking, with a hand stationed by his jaw and ready to apply pressure should his teeth clamp shut on the spoon. He felt the gentle coaxing on his jaw and willed it to open. At the same time, he heard, "Come on kid, you got to eat something."

After the spoonful had been placed in his mouth, Sasuke focused on swallowing on his own. Then again. Each time, he felt the presence of the other man's hand dropping to the column of his throat first with its usual stroking, then gradually fading to just checking to see if the muscles were moving accurately. Finally, when a this victory was repeated a few times and he felt safe, Sasuke tried speaking.

"I'm nineteen. I'm not a kid."

There was a pause, and then Sasuke felt a spoon being inserted into his mouth, and swallowed. His caretaker's response followed:

"I'm thirty-one. Yes, you are."

Another spoonful was shoved into Sasuke's mouth. Obediently, he took it. But once he had let several pass down his throat, curiosity made him speak again. "I can't open my eyes."

"There's a blindfold tied over them," the other voice answered, still feeding Sasuke as it explained. "It keeps the sun from shining on them."

"Oh."

"Do you want it off?" The spoonfuls stopped coming, and Sasuke heard the sound of the bowl being set down before he nodded his assent. Then his caretaker's hands were around his head, fiddling with a cloth that he hadn't noticed was there until it had been mentioned. Vaguely, he wondered who this person could be to have realized how sensitive his eyes were to light after they were drained from over use of his Sharingan, and then the blindfold was lowered. His vision was blurred at first, but he registered blue lingering before his eyes. Sasuke had had to blink several times in quick succession before he regained the ability to see straight. The face of his captor came into focus afterward, and Sasuke felt his body stiffen where it reclined on the cot. The person sitting next to him was dangerous; a person that he had only learned the name of because he was warned to be one of the greatest obstacles between him and Itachi's death.

Hoshigaki Kisame.

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After Sasuke came to be Orochimaru's underling, after a rather shaking battle with his former teammate, he was reassured that he had made the right choice. Unlike in the Leaf Village, where his goal was treated as a personal interest, Orochimaru made it the subject of daily discussion. Orochimaru seemed to know a wide range of facts about Itachi, from his most commonly used attacks to his favorite foods, and which of said foods could and could not be poisoned. He had the unnerving feeling that if asked, Orochimaru could draw him a map locating every birthmark on his brother's body. But all the same, the intimate knowledge was never rejected or scoffed at. As uncomfortable as some of the fact told to him were, they were at the same time reassuring. They held witness to the fact that now his training had a purpose that aligned with his ultimate goal to see justice come crashing down on his brother's head.

Though, he was ordered not to call his mission as such.

_"There is no such thing as justice, Sasuke-kun."_

Instead, Orochimaru had Sasuke refer to his goal as what it was: murder. The plotting and executing of the death of a specific person, who may or may not be expecting it to happen.

Throughout the years of training, the subject of his brother's partner had only come up once. Orochimaru summed Kisame up in one brief, informative lecture. The blue-skinned man was a fugitive from the Mist, and yes, the gills on his face did work. For that reason, Sasuke was warned not to challenge Itachi in a marine environment. Kisame was a swordsman, and had a great deal of chakra at his disposal, which Sasuke was told rather bluntly that he could not match and not to try. He was cautioned against approaching both Kisame and Itachi together, for the simple reason that Itachi and Kisame had been working together for many years, and that chances were likely they were more than capable of synchronizing their rather different attack styles and snuffing Sasuke out faster than a lighted candle left out in a hurricane. His only hope of returning from the final battle between Uchiha and Uchiha, Orochimaru had said, was to have Kisame thoroughly distracted and far, far away.

_"If by some chance of fate, you manage to kill Itachi without taking steps to avoid Kisame," _Sasuke was told, _"and if you are too drained to escape afterwards, do not fret. Kisame will kill you."_

With Orochimaru, Sasuke devised a plan to have Kisame distracted by subordinates of his teacher, while Sasuke went on to face his brother. But that plan was forgotten the day he found his mentor's body sprawled out on the floor of the kage office in the Sound. The snake sannin's eyes had been dilated, his face contorted in pain and cringing as he let out periodic cries of terror. Whatever was causing the distress written on Orochimaru's face had been unclear to the observing Uchiha when he entered the room, until he examined the signs closer, the twitching, the drooling. . .and then he had left the plans they made together as he left the snake sannin himself: for dead.

He had already been trained to recognize Itachi's work.

He knew that when Orochimaru came out of the nightmare playing and replaying inside of his head, if he ever did, he would be useless to the Sound. There was a chance that perhaps the Sound's nest kage would keep him alive and cared for in honor of his pervious position, but Sasuke knew more likely the snake master would be killed. Deadweight was not something acceptable in the hidden village that Orochimaru had formed.

When he left the kage office, he noticed a body slumped further down the hall that he hadn't seen before. Propped in a sitting position against the wall, its face angled downward, Sasuke wasn't able to confirm its identity. But the hair was silver, and along the line of the man's arm and spider-webbed across its palm, Sasuke could see a trail of blood. Whether it was a corpse, or merely the form of someone who had been wondered in defending or avenging the Sound's leader, Sasuke didn't stop to find out. He slipped out of the Sound Village as quickly as he was able. In the history books of the Sound, Lead, and Sand after the war between the three countries ended, he would probably be written as the coward who fled from his master's side at the sight of his death, or possibly even as his murderer. Sasuke didn't care.

The chances that he had managed to exit the village unseen were unlikely. Right along with the report of his departure in the national history books, there might also be a quote from some civilian child or housemaid saying, _"I saw Uchiha Sasuke running after the murder. He had his Sharingan on, and there was spittle in the corners of his mouth. I tried to wish him good day, and he nearly stabbed me in the chest with a kunai still hold in his right hand."_ By the time that caution managed to catch up with him and replace the frenzied _need_ to find his brother before it was too late, he was miles from the village.

His success in finding Itachi as quickly as he did came after, and was largely due to the help of inn keepers, who were sympathetic to the plight of a timid stranger whose older brother had decided to play a hurtful prank by moving ahead in their "bonding" trip without him. Sasuke found Itachi within days, and killed him within the span of a few hours. And if there was an initial sense of success and relief afterward, Sasuke missed it when he had keeled over on top of his brother's corpse and promptly sunk into oblivion.

When he woke up and Kisame removed his blindfold, and furthermore decided that it was better for him to keep it off, an error in his plans became evident. He had gone against Orochimaru's warnings and attach Itachi without a care as to whatever else was around them. Kisame had not been distracted; the only reason that he hadn't been present at all during his fight with Itachi was because he had been in a nearby town, securing lodgings for the night. He had attacked Itachi head on, the moment that he saw the briefest flash of a red and black cloak amidst the sand and stone of the bleak climate. He had been as careless as he had been at the age of thirteen. None of what he had learned with Orochimaru had come into play during the fight. And yet. . .he was alive, and Itachi was dead. And the wrath of his brother's infamous partner did not come crashing down on his defenseless body afterward. Instead, the blue-skinned Akatsuki member had plucked Sasuke's unconscious form from the rocky sands and carried it back to the room that he had been planning to share with Itachi. Then Kisame had carried him father the next day, and the next. Sasuke knew better than to ask where after his eyes were uncovered.

The location of the Akatsuki base, though touched upon several times during his training, had never been revealed. Orochimaru never forgot that Sasuke's loyalty lay first with his goal, and if he was willing to betray his home village, he would need far less reason to betray his second. Nevertheless, there were certain landmarks that he had learned to look for, indications of what country and what climate that he should look to when he was finally ready to confront the weasel of the Uchiha clan.

And so, it didn't take him long to realize that Kisame was taking him to face the Akatsuki, living testament to Uchiha Itachi's demise. He supposed, for awhile, that revenge would be taken out on him by the missing nins who had known and worked with his brother for almost eleven years.

Again, he was wrong.

Sasuke's strength improved rapidly after he regained control over his jaws. By the third day after the blindfold's removal, he was able to walk on his own, though shakily. By an eccentric streak of concern, Kisame always made sure the match his pace to the Uchiha's so that whenever Sasuke began to fall, his blue skinned captor was within reach. On the seventh day, Sasuke had not only re-mastered the art of balance, but was also carrying the smaller of the two packs Kisame had dragged through the desert. Which, Sasuke later found out, when hunger made him sift through its contents, was Itachi's.

Sasuke knew better than to try to escape while he was on the recovery. For one thing, he knew for a fact that though his build might have been better suited for speed than his captor's, Kisame's longer legs combined with how his endurance and current health surpassed the Uchiha's own, made the outcome of any attempt at running painfully obvious.

But Kisame seemed not to be aware of that.

It was common knowledge that missing nin usually prefer not to take prisoners; after all, any baggage that breathed can also kill. So when Kisame first disappeared from camp for a time span of two hours, Sasuke first credited it to the possibility that he might be one of the shark nin's first prisoners. But Kisame never seemed to realize his repeating mistake. Even when Sasuke's strength returned to normal, Kisame still left camp every evening. Sasuke imagined that occasionally he felt eyes on him after the other left, but had to admit that even with his Sharingan activated, he never found anything to support the suspicion.

_Why _he didn't take advantage of those long evenings to disappear into the surrounding cliffs and sand dunes, Sasuke was reluctant to admit. One evening he had stood up and started walking away from the campsite, and had even gotten far enough away on the flat land that the campfire looked like nothing more than a tiny dot on the horizon by the time he turned around. He had stared fist at the campfire in the distance, then at the dark plane he had been walking towards, and stood still for five long minutes before he started walking again. Kisame had already returned to camp by the time that Sasuke got back, and looked genuinely surprised when Sasuke walked into the circle of light and sat down across the fire from him. Neither of them spoke, except when Sasuke announced that he was willing to take the first watch.

The next day, Sasuke had to grudgingly admit to himself that he wasn't struggling against his captivity. And since Kisame hadn't appeared concerned about hunting him down, he wasn't being _held _captive either. And that led to questioning why he was still traveling with his late brother's partner. By the end of the day, Sasuke still didn't have an answer.

_. . . Where else would you go?_

Sasuke discovered the reason he eventually settled on when he curiously dipped into his brother's bag for a spare shirt when he own began to smell. The very scent of Itachi, clinging to his clothing, was enough to make Sasuke's body tense in expectation. It gave him an urge to look around for the kunai coming at him from when he was a child, naively viewing his brother, spattered in their parents' blood, and thinking for one moment that he had been a hero instead of a murderer. . .

Sasuke had selected one of his brother's tank tops and quickly closed the bag. The chill that lingered with him for days afterward gave him all the reason he needed to stay on with Kisame: Itachi was dead, and though he remembered feeling the warmth exuded from his brother's corpse, there was something in him that wasn't convinced that the scene in his memory had really happened. He was now bound by an uncharacteristic instability that would not let him disappear until he had seen _some sort _of a reaction to what he did. He needed something, anything, to tell him that the blood stains on his shirt were really from the nightmare figure still frequenting his sleep, and that Itachi wasn't hiding somewhere, alive and unharmed, waiting to commit another life-altering event.

But Itachi never did stop out of the shadows in the corner of Sasuke's eyes, and Kisame continued to regard him carefully, like a pet that might or might not turn on the hand that fed it. Their pace toward the steadily growing mountain range in the distance never once slowed. Conversations between them were short. Sasuke imaged that it was due to the mutual caution they felt for one another. There was also a stiffness to the Kisame's movements that Sasuke couldn't quiet name the source of. For reasons that neither of them wanted toe challenge, they rarely met eyes, though Sasuke was aware that he was constantly watch as an enemy. He did the same to the former Mist nin.

During a rainstorm that they hadn't stopped for, Kisame fished out Itachi's cloak and wrapped it around the shivering younger Uchiha when his own clothing proved insufficient. In the intense cold that the weather provided, he hadn't thought to be repulsed be repulsed by the fabric that was still stained around the collar, or wonder what the shark nin had done with his brother's body. Instead, he only pulled it more tightly around himself and carried on at Kisame's heels. After the storm had ended, the cloak stayed with the nineteen year old. Kisame never asked for it back, and though Sasuke thought that once he caught the shark nin staring pointedly at him, he never offered it.

Their pact of not speaking to one another unless necessary was broken abruptly when their path touched the foot of the mountains. Kisame stopped his younger charge short when he turned around sharply and fixed the nineteen year old with a deliberately cold look. For the first time since coming to sit across the fire from his brother's partner, Sasuke felt that his presence was almost surprising to the blue skinned man in front of him. Though now it wasn't a grudging caretaker that dealt the look, but the shinobi that had match Uchiha Itachi glare for glare for over a decade.

Kisame bluntly asked, "Are you coming with me?"

Sasuke had stared back at the other missing nin, noting the weathered slash in his hitai-ate, the gills, the inhuman teeth. For a moment, he wondered how Itachi had first reacted to the creature in front of him. The partner that should have cared that Itachi was gone.

_"Do not fret. Kisame will kill you."_

Sasuke's voice when he answered was flat and sounded chillingly unlike his own. "Where else would I go?"

Silence followed. Then a nod. Kisame ducked off the set trail and into the bush that grow around it. He left Sasuke to follow after him, never letting out a warning when he was going to take a sharp turn, or which direction. Sasuke learned quickly that molding chakra into his feet on the gravelly earth required concentration to keep from sliding downward with a layer of pebbles on the bottoms on his sandals. He kept his complaints to himself though, and followed the former Mist ninja up into the mountains, matching his speed when he could, fixing his eyes on the red and black cloak when he couldn't, until Kisame suddenly ducked into what he had taken to be a shallow nook in the solid rocks around him, knocked four times in a peculiar order, and then walked inside when the rock surface seemed to slide out of his way of its own accord.

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Orochimaru, conscious of his ward's occasional spurts of impatience, had been careful about what information he gave out about the Akatsuki members. He knew, and Sasuke knew, that there was an equal chance of any one of them creating a pot hole in Sasuke's road to success. The snake sannin had spoken most freely of his former partner, listing the puppet maker's strengths and weaknesses in criticizing tones that told Sasuke there had been little, if any, affection lost between comrades when Orochimaru turned traitorous. When word had reached them that somehow the former Sand shinobi known as Sasori had managed to survive a rather crude succession of sword attacks, Orochimaru had turned up his nose and said that of course, the puppeteer would be too stubborn to let himself be killed by Leaf shinobi.

The list had been ordered from who his mentor had judged most likely to interfere to least likely, naturally starting with Kisame and moving downward. But the list had moved slowly, and when Orochimaru had died, it had still not been finished, leaving Sasuke only partially schooled on Itachi's comrades. And so it was with a quiet wariness that Sasuke stepped into the shadows of the Akatsuki base, Sharingan activated and standing close behind his shark-like guide.

He knew who the Akatsuki members were, more or less, because of rumors that had reached him in the Sound before his last sensei's death. The organization had lost a fair amount of its secrecy when they began hunting the demon vessels. He also knew that the leader, though said to a formidable man, made sure to at all times have at least one of his agent teams stationed at home base. Apparently, he wasn't stupid.

But Sasuke did not know anything about the blond creature that casually greeted them as they passed down one of the dark, winding tunnels. The person was bird-boned, and had a peculiar kind of bold cheerfulness to his voice that was almost disarming. Sasuke blinked at the man, who he had only realized was a man when he heard the decidedly male octaves to his voice. One visible large blue eye flashed, looking over Kisame, and then Sasuke. The color, combined with the voice, made something jump in the back of Sasuke's mind, an echo of another blue eyed blond who at first glance seemed too bold and informal to be a shinobi at all.

"Kisame, Itachi," the blond was saying as he came nearer to them. "Did you just get back? Sasori and I are suppose to. . ." The blonde's hand, half raised in a wave, paused and allowed Sasuke to make out an unusual slit running across the palm. _Deidara,_ Sasuke's memory supplied instantly, Sasori's rumored replacement partner after Orochimaru turned traitorous. "Kisame, un. . ." The mouth-sporting hand was lowered. The one eyebrow that was revealed by the man's hair arched as he stared hard at Sasuke's face. Dumbly, he stated, "That's not Itachi."

"No," Kisame agreed without pausing. The blue man's head turned enough so that Kisame could look over his shoulder to observe his quiet companion. "No, it's not."

"Un." Deidara's subtly bird-like features became more noticeable when he cocked his head to one side. Particularly the odd point to his lips, which made Sasuke half seriously wonder if ought to protect his eyes incase the older man suddenly decided to start pecking at him.

Kisame moved to go around Deidara without a word more. Sasuke followed, staring back when he felt the one blue eye on his face. For a second, he felt relieved to be going away from the curiously staring blond, but it was quickly snubbed when he heard footsteps start up behind him, followed by Deidara brushing past him to catch up with Kisame.

"Un," he said, unperturbed, "so where is Itachi?"

Kisame was silent for a moment, during which Sasuke imagined he was looking down at the blond through the corner of his eye. He answered stiffly, "Gone."

"Gone?" Deidara echoed normally, uncomprehendingly. "It's not like him to let you do the mission report, un."

Staring at the back of the shark nin's head, Sasuke couldn't tell if the older missing nin showed any signs of surprise at his comrade's failure to grasp the meaning of the word "gone." Remembering his own difficulties with Naruto in the past, he inwardly nodded his head in sympathy.

"Un, Sasori-danna says that some day Itachi's going to go around breaking all our mirrors because he doesn't trust his own reflection not to ruin him, un."

They rounded a corner at the back of the hall, and Sasuke felt the ground angle slightly downward. They were going deeper into the mountain.

"Did he go into town?" Deidara asked when Kisame didn't respond to his last statement.

_"No,"_ Kisame said in a voice that could have been barbed as he continued to stare pointedly into the hallway ahead. "Deidara, he _gone."_

"Un," the bird-like shinobi replied; his tone was still too light for him to have understood what Kisame was trying to say. "Well, one of the girls from that jewelry place he likes told me his order came in the last time I was down there. Are you sure he didn't go to pick it up?"

_"Deidara."_

"Un?"

Kisame stopped walking abruptly, pausing their procession in the middle of the stone hallway. When he turned around to look at his younger comrade, Sasuke instinctively drew back. Deidara only blinked up at Kisame.

"Deidara, Itachi is not in town. He's _gone."_

Sasuke was able to trace the path that the bird-like Akatsuki agent's one visible eye took as it raked over Kisame's face, taking in the bags that were so hard to see with the shark-nin's unusual complexion, the unyielding line of his mouth, and the clear tension in his shoulders. "Un, you look like hell. . . " he said after a moment. Then the blue pupil darted to one side to fix Sasuke with a look that less curiosity than before, and more examination. "Who did you say that kid was?"

Kisame let the breath come out of his lungs in one puff. "Later, Deidara. Sir leader will want to see me."

Kisame pushed past Deidara before another question could be asked. As Sasuke moved to follow, the blond man turned a look on the blue nin's back that partly confusion and partly offence at being so abruptly brushed aside. Either way, Sasuke was sure that he felt eyes on his back for a full five minutes before the tunnel turned into stairs. Kisame led him downward.

Thankfully, they did not encounter any more organization members for the rest of their descent.

As they went farther into the mountain tunnels, the air began to grow warm and damp. Sasuke began to sweat, and wonder vaguely how the inside of a mountain managed to get so humid. When one side of the tunnel gave way and in its place Sasuke saw cavern baring a large, steaming, clear pool far below that seemed to stretch out for several yards, he understood. _Hot springs. _

With the rise in heat, the lighting disappeared as they went father into the labyrinth. Kisame maneuvered his way around the stone corners and jutting steps with an ease that he assumed to have come from years of traveling these inner pathways, but Sasuke could only squint into the blackness and look to the slightly blacker figure in front of him for clues as to when the path would suddenly change. He got the feeling that Kisame was listing to his footsteps, either to test how well he was able to predict the stony path, or to make sure that he was still there.

Sasuke nearly stumbled twice, and thought that he heard what might have been a chuckle disguised as a quickly blown out breath at least once, before the appearance of a thin lining of light cutting the share of a rectangle caught his eye.

"Sunlamps," Kisame explained as they passed what must have been a door, apparently able to decipher Sasuke's interest from just a momentary pause between steps. "Zetsu likes it down here because of the humidity. When he's not scouting other countries, he lives down here with his apprentice."

Kisame never even turned to glance at him, nor did he stop walking when Sasuke did.

"Oh."

Their walk ended at another door marked by a sliver of light, where Sasuke was told to wait out in the narrow hallway until he was called for. Kisame dropped his pack on the floor, rolled his shoulders to return the feeling to them, and then went in alone. Sasuke did likewise (save for the last step), the door opening and a dim light filling the hallway for just a moment, during which his back just happened to be turned away. Afterward, he felt out the wall behind him, found a smooth spot, and leaned against it. Distantly, he could feel the chakra signatures of the other Akatsuki agents in the base. None of them were close enough for his eyes to detect their chakra, save for Kisame in the other room, but the sources were too large and unmasked for him to miss. Except for the leader. As Sasuke's eyes focused on the faint shape of the door across from him, he could still see Kisame's chakra seeping out from the crack above the floor, but that was all. Whoever else was in that room was either unusually gifted with hiding their chakra, or had discovered some way to keep his from going beyond the room. Then, straining his ears momentarily in the silence of the hallway, Sasuke noted that he could not even hear the faintest murmur beyond the door.

A thin hair of suspicion stood up in the back of his mind. While slinking down to where he had dropped Itachi's travel pack, Sasuke was extremely aware of the fact that despite how peculiarly uncaring Kisame might pretend to be, he was unarmed in the heart of an organization that had one hell of a reason to be angry with him.

Itachi's bag was smaller and lighter than his partner's for a reason, Sasuke found out after a moment of searching. Most of what Itachi needed was able to be carried on his person, which included the tools of his profession. Sasuke felt cautiously around the spare clothing articles, looking for the cool edge of a kunai or shuriken, but there was nothing Itachi left behind to help his little brother protect himself. He was about to close the bag when something shifted and cold metal finally brushed against Sasuke's finger tips. Too small to be a weapon and too heavy to be a button sprung loose from one of the many trousers, Sasuke pulled the item out to examine it in the near lightless hallway. His Sharingan provided some help to seeing in the darkness, but it wasn't necessary. Sasuke laid a small ring on his palm, tracing its shape with one finger. Smooth metal, and something else. Pinching it between two fingers, Sasuke lifted the ring first to his nose, then down to his mouth where his tongue darted out to taste the mysterious matter caked around the edge of the ring. Dried blood. But like all shinobi who managed to pass Academy level, Sasuke knew that blood didn't dry on metal, and so while picked at the crusted surface, he tried to think of a name for the hardened substance. Skin, maybe. Or muscle. Or just meat.

He almost had the ring clean when a thought struck him. Itachi's finger. When the light bounced off a ring his brother had been wearing. Sasuke had thought that it was the ring the Akatsuki had provided when Itachi joined their ranks, a part of his brother's uniform. But the ring he was holding was plain, bent and worn to match the shape of a finger joint that was constantly forming a fist or clenching around the handle of something or other. And it was crusted with dead matter that had stuck to it when a kunai had crudely sliced through the flesh and bone.

_Kisame,_ Sasuke thought distantly. The shark nin must have spotted it when he found Itachi's body. The ring that had cost its owner his life.

"Um. . .Itachi-san?"

The sudden voice behind him made Sasuke jump. He stood instantly and turned, Itachi's travel bag still open on the floor behind him. The outline of a man was standing in the middle of the narrow hallway, less than three feet from Sasuke. He could see the subtle chakra swirling in the air around him, but somehow he had failed to notice the other man's approach. However, before he could identify the figure from his early briefings with his former sensei, the person in front of him stiffened and took one step back cautiously.

He asked Sasuke, "Who are you?"

Sasuke startled. Deidara had seen him in full lamplight and had only realized that he wasn't Itachi as a second thought, but _this_ person was looking at him in near blackness, and still. . .

The door between Sasuke and the strange opened suddenly, spilling light into the hallway so that Sasuke flinched before letting go of his Sharingan. The other person across from him seemed to flinch too. His specter, Sasuke noticed, was older than he thought. His face was covered, but when the light brought the other's body into greater detail, the shape and size suggested that he might have been as old as Kakashi. Give or take.

Kisame nodded in greeting to the hallway's extra occupant. "Hello, Tobi."

"Hello," the other man nodded back briefly, but when Kisame's head turned to Sasuke, the masked missing nin demanded, "Kisame-san, where's Itachi?"

The way that the shark nin's shoulders abruptly stiffened made Sasuke raise an eyebrow. Turning back, Tobi's head cocked to one side as Kisame stated more bluntly than he had with Deidara, "Itachi's dead."

_"Nani?"_

The two word sentence couldn't have been met with a louder answer. For the second time, Sasuke flinched as Tobi's incredulous shout echoed down the hall. He thought that he even felt a momentary bubble of warning chakra from the leader's office.

_"Orochimaru?"_ the masked man asked, but Kisame had already recovered from the ringing in his ears and was motioning for Sasuke to come into the other room. He did so, stepping momentarily in front of the person identified as Tobi. He noticed that the mask had only one eyehole carved into its surface, and wondered absently if the Akatsuki had a fondness for one-eyed fighters and if he ought to tell them about his former sensei from the Leaf. He paused in mid step, and in mid thought, when a turn of the man's head made the light shin directly into the eyehole for a second, and send out a brief flash of a dark red pupil. Kisame had to reach out impatiently and shake Sasuke back into motion.

Before the door closed behind him, the shark nin lingered to mutter something to the man outside that Sasuke couldn't hear. He glanced at the blue man's back as he waited, contemplating how he could ask about the unusual eye color later.

The leader's office wasn't as light the tunnels above that the majority of his employees used, but still notably easier to see in that the stone passageway that led to it. The room itself was sparsely decorated, though considering that it wasn't a room typically used for entertaining, that was understandable. The leader himself sat behind a large desk at the end of the room, where the lighting dramatically cut off. Sasuke glanced upward to see if there was a missing light bulb, but a jab at his shoulder from behind told him that he was not suppose to do that.

The leader had his chair turned away. Sasuke stared at the back, aware of Kisame now standing behind him like a living wall between Sasuke and the door.

"I've been told you killed Uchiha Itachi." The leader's voice was deep and only bordering on curiosity. Sasuke answered on when he felt a nudge from Kisame that told him he was expected to.

"Hai."

There wasn't so much as a pause from the man in the chair. "Outside of the Sound?"

"Hai."

"Orochimaru," the voice went on, "was declared dead several weeks back. Sources have informed us that his death was actually an execution when his body was found in an _unoccupied _state. His spare body was reported to be missing afterward."

Sasuke, aware that the term "spare body" had been adopted by some of Orochimaru's less respectful underlings to describe his status in the Sound, frowned at hearing someone outside the hidden village blatantly using it. The leader continued, "Kisame has also informed me that when his last mission was carried out, Orochimaru was in a surprisingly _docile_ state."

Silence followed, during which Sasuke got the feeling that Kisame's eyes were boring into the back of his head. He remained silent, waiting to hear why this information was being told to him. The chair turned slightly, and through the shadows obscuring his view of the man's face, what Sasuke thought of as an unnaturally bright golden eye fixed on him. It stayed on him for a long time, during which Sasuke had the distinct feel that he was being sized up and weighed like and animal. When the man spoke next, Sasuke wouldn't have blinked if he were asked to open his mouth and let the shadowy figure examine his teeth. But instead, "Kisame also tells me that after Itachi's death, you returned with him to this organization of your own will?"

There was a light nudge on Sasuke's shoulder.

"Hai."

The bright eyes stared at him, and at Kisame's persistent nudge, Sasuke stared right back. He forced himself to hold the critical gaze, striving to keep his face impassive. This was someone even Itachi had bowed to, and that fact in itself was alarming.

Tension ebbed in Sasuke's shoulder when the chair turned, and the blazing eyes once again went to study the wall behind the leader's desk. "Very well, then."

Kisame's hand stayed stationed directly behind Sasuke's shoulder. He wondered if the leader could see it.

"Welcome back, Orochimaru."

While the muscles in Sasuke's jaw suddenly decided to try impersonating strings of cooked spaghetti, Kisame skillfully took control of his movements, spinning him around and swiftly applying pressure to his shoulder so that by the time his eyebrows had risen, Sasuke was already back out in the hallway with the office door shut behind him.

In the darkness, he couldn't see the shark nin's face, nor even see if the masked shinobi from before was still there, but he heard the sound of gravel moving on the stone floor when Kisame picked up one of the two bags they had left out there. "Let's go. I'll show you to your room. . .Oro."

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When one spends years alone with another person, it is impossible to think that they wont adopt some of the other's minor traits, no matter how guarded or resistant one of both parties may be. This had doubtlessly happened with Sasuke in regards to his former mentor. Though he had never gone so far to join Orochimaru in his affinity for snakes, he knew many of his old masters quirks. He knew that Orochimaru had an unfathomable love for watching shark meat being diced and prepared for supper. He preferred to have it burnt whenever possible, to which there were multiple raised eyebrows, but no comments when a perfectly prepared dish was dubbed too raw and sent back to the chef. Sasuke also knew that Orochimaru had a strange obsession with boys with long dark hair. Orochimaru insisted that every boy with brown or raven colored hair, Sasuke included, grow it out for his amusement. Sasuke had thought it rather strange, but it was a small detail. Then also, Sasuke had noticed about two or three years after joining the Sound, Orochimaru preferred to watch his prisoners be put to death. The Sound's kage had a favorite method that involved a snake slowly inserted into the prisoner's mouth until it was startled by the condemned soul's gag reflex, startling the poisonous creature into attacking the back of the throat. Orochimaru said that it was a test of the prisoner's will power, to see how much control over their body they could exert in the face of certain death. Sasuke thought that it was just an excuse to see his pets being deep throated by desperate people.

But of course, to the best of Sasuke's knowledge, he had shown none of those traits since leaving the Sound. Nor anything else that would have led Kisame to mistake him for Orochimaru inhabiting a new body. But cautious of other ears that could have been listening, Sasuke kept silent until the shark nin had led him back up into the lighter tunnels, and then down a wider passageway with two doorways on either side. They went into the first one they came to on the left side.

"I'm not Orochimaru," he said lowly after he had pushed the door shut behind them. Kisame was already turning to face him.

"I know."

"Then why did you. . .?"

Sasuke's question trailed off at the sound of footsteps echoing from outside the doorway. When the sound faded off, Kisame didn't leave him a chance to restate his question. He demanded to know just how much Sasuke knew about the organization. Sasuke had thought about dodging the question, but the way the shark nin's cool eyes held him reminded him that he was looking at someone who had dealt with Itachi's evasive behavior for nearly eleven years. And despite the simple picture that Orochimaru had painted of him, Kisame had the upper hand. Sasuke recited what he knew of the Akatsuki, the nine members policy, the sort of missions that they carried out, and brief personal backgrounds on some of the better known members. Kisame listened to him, and then filled in potholes in Sasuke's knowledge to help him maintain the image of Orochimaru.

"And that's _all_ Orochimaru told you?" Kisame pressed when they were finished.

Sasuke frowned from where he was still standing between the former Mist ninja and the door. He thought that Kisame's eyes were resting somewhere around his hitai-ate rather than on his face. "Is there something else I should know?"

The shark nin's eyes lowered back down to met his for a second, then Kisame coughed and shook his head.

"No, I guess not," Kisame said after a moment, during which Sasuke's confused frown only deepened. Kisame hurriedly went on to inform Sasuke of the next most important concern. Which was that, given the circumstances, he was now under house arrest. "Just until the Leader is sure that you're really who you say you are."

Sasuke thought about commenting that he never said he was anyone, but dismissed the notion as childish. Kisame rose to leave. "If you need anything," he said as he passed around the Uchiha, "my room's right next door."

Sasuke nodded, but Kisame lingered by the door.

"You, uh. . .might want to avoid Sasori if you can. Just until you're cleared."

Sasuke nodded again, understanding completely at least this part of the instruction. Then Kisame stepped out of the room and closed the door, leaving Sasuke alone in Orochimaru's former room.

During the weeks that followed, Kisame left the base frequently on missions. Sasuke built on Kisame's advice and avoided all Akatsuki members to the best of his abilities. Though no one approached him, Sasuke kept in mind that he was playing the part of a traitorous comrade who was still pending readmission into the fold. Before he left on his last mission, Kisame had hinted that the Leader might decide to have Sasuke watched, and if Sasuke's experience with Tobi in the lower tunnels had meant anything, the chances of him noticing were slim. So Sasuke kept hi guard up at all times, aware of the fact that his brothers' former partner had not warned him of what to expect should the organization decide that trusting Orochimaru again was not a risk they were willing to take. After all, hadn't Kisame and Itachi been on a mission to exterminate their traitorous former comrade when he found them?

But installed in the heart of the Akatsuki under his late mentor's name, Sasuke was in no position to pose questions. From the calculating sideways glances he received whenever he passed Sasori in the hallways, he got the feeling that somehow Kisame had trapped him on a balance point that could all too easily be upset by the first uncertain movement. So he waited out Kisame's absences, aware that when the shark nin was present at the base, the likelihood of him being stopped and confronted by another agent was lowered.

Sasuke couldn't be sure how much safety he could assume he had in Orochimaru's room opposed to anywhere else in the base. The room was cramped both because of its size and because of the multiple stacks of boxes that lined two of its four walls. Sasuke took chances peering into the other three bedrooms along the hall - Kisame's first, when he stopped the former Mist shinobi to ask about what they were suppose to do for laundry. Another time, he had looked into the room directly across from his, when the door had been mysteriously blown off its hinges by an unknown source. Sasuke, who had just been coming down the tunnel, saw Sasori standing with his arms crossed inside, while Deidara gestured rapidly, trying to explain something or other.

Kisame had heard the explosion from inside his own room and came out to stand beside the curiously eaves-dropping Uchiha.

"Something interest you?" he had asked Sasuke after glancing in at the not-too-uncommon sight of the two artists arguing over the beauty of explosion.

"All the Akatsuki have roommates," Sasuke stated slowly.

"Yeah," Kisame's tone indicated that he did not known why the fact would interest the shorter ninja. "The Leader wanted to do that one reason or another." He shrugged and gestured toward the empty door frame. "No one really seemed to mind, other than those two."

"Hn." Sasuke lowered his voice, despite being sure that Deidara's volume would effectively keep the former Sand and Stone ninjas from hearing him. "What about Orochimaru?"

Kisame glanced over his shoulder, back toward the open doorway to the room that Sasuke occupied alone, and answered, "Beats me. Oro was here long before I came around."

Sasuke was silent for a moment, thinking of the other Akatsuki members he had been. Even Zetsu, he knew, shared his humid room with his unofficial partner, Tobi. Then he thought of Kisame's room, large enough for two. "What about Itachi?"

Even with his head still turned toward the argument in the other room, which was now dying down to Deidara grudgingly making the rhetorical promise that he would stop blowing up his clay statues in their room, Sasuke could see Kisame stiffen.

"We shared a room," was hissed out after a moment.

Turning away from his partner, Deidara looked out into the hall, probably to survey the damage done to the doorway, and Kisame and Sasuke promptly turned away before either could be caught staring.

Sasuke returned to his room, and thought idly to himself that, perhaps he had really been cheated into using a closet that Sasori had thrown his former partner's belongings into after Deidara had joined the organization. Either way, Sasuke only needed to glance across the room to where the metal hinges to Sasori and Deidara's bedroom door were still letting out little trails of steam, to deiced that he was perfectly fine with his sleeping arrangements.

In the snake sannin's room, Sasuke was only able to find a few pieces of actual furniture buried under the boxes. There was a single twin bed on one side of the room, which needed to be aired, but other than that was perfectly usable. A desk was found in one corner, empty and seeming to only serve the purpose of holding more boxes. And then when he cleared away the boxes at the foot of his bed, of all things, he found a television set. Sasuke peered at the civilian contraption for a moment, trying and failing to remember any time that he had seen his former mentor express an interest in technology that couldn't be harnessed into a sound-based weapon. Then after turning it on for a moment, he promptly reburied it upon seeing that the thing, lacking antenna, was as useless to him as the desk.

Sasuke let the boxes escape his inspection for a bit longer, mostly due to the sheer number of them. He could almost have made the mistake of calling Orochimaru a pack rat, if not for the fact that he had not un-recent memories of Orochimaru disposing of objects, and people, once they had lost their usefulness. Anything he found in Orochimaru's room, he knew, would either be something that the snake sannin had thought expendable, or too dangerous to take with him when he left to form the Sound.

The first box that Sasuke delved into held nothing but clothes - the Akatsuki uniform mostly, which Orochimaru had doubtlessly had no problem parting with when he left. Sasuke had begun wearing the uniform shortly after going on probation, but even if Orochimaru hadn't been too tall for his clothing to fit, Sasuke would still have had no need to keep the box's contents. At some point, Kisame had noticed Sasuke's body had developed into a shape almost identical to his brother's and, somehow managing to be both considerate and chilling at the same time, the shark nin had suggested handing over Itachi's remaining clothing rather than wasting material on new uniforms for Orochimaru's second body. The Leader had approved.

Crouching down over the box, Sasuke plunged his hand into the rumbled old clothing. His nose wrinkled in distaste when dust flew up at him in response. As he felt curiously around the bottom, he glanced at the towering stacks of still unopened boxes, and wondered whether anyone would think he was being out of character if he decided to dispose of some of them. There was no point in keeping old clothing. . .

Sasuke frowned when his fingers bumped into something solid. It was blunt and nonmetal, and when Sasuke pulled it out from under the layers of red and black clothes, he blinked at it in confusion. It was a video cassette tape. Staring at it, Sasuke turned the tape over in his hands, looking for a label that wasn't there. His eyes moved to the castle of boxes he built at the foot of the bed, hiding the antenna-less television set. Sasuke spent a moment sitting beside the clothing box, trying to remember whether there had even been a VCR slot on the television. Then he got up.

He tossed the cassette tape onto his bed as he crossed the room and went to work on dismantling his box-sculpture. He stacked them across the room one by one, forming a waist-high wall that divided the room so that whoever came in would find a nice little barrier between them and Sasuke's television. The fact that Sasuke found the thought amusing was a testament of how the weeks of idleness were wearing down on him.

When the television set was uncovered, Sasuke picked up the videotape again. Again, he looked for a mark of some sort, but there wasn't even the sticky reside of a peeled sticker. The film visible inside was divided equally on both sides, indicating that it had only been half done when it was last viewed.

He knelt in front of the television set and found the VCR slot built in near the bottom; apparently, the entertainment device had served a purpose after all. Sasuke thought about rewinding the tape before watching it, incase it turned out to be something unappealing to him, but the television set switched on automatically when the cassette was inserted. The screen turned bright blue for a second, before abruptly jumping into play mode.

_"-ame."_

Sasuke glanced up from the control buttons instinctively at the sound of the painfully recognizable deep voice. His hand promptly fell listlessly to the floor in front of the control panel as he stared at the images on the screen.

He recognized the background from the brief glimpses he managed to get of the room Kisame supposedly shared with Itachi, but he attention was turned to one of the two beds on which the camera had been focused. Itachi's head was lolled back on Kisame's shoulder. Sasuke stared stupidly at his brother's open mouth and closed eyes, noting the frustrated expression but falling to grasp its cause.

Kisame was holding Itachi on his lap. Sasuke blinked and let that bit of information sink in, even as his eyes raked over the two forms, from the damp strands of hair that were clinging to his brother's temple, to where his legs were tangled together with the former Mist nin's. And the first thought that came to him was the absurdity of how petite his brother looked against Kisame's wide chest. There was on strong blue arm barring Itachi's upper torso, pressing his slender form back against his partner and holding him still as a sharp set of teeth dug into the junction between neck and shoulder. Likewise, there was a second arm reaching across Itachi's hips, holding its position even as the former Uchiha heir tried to buck against it. Itachi made a deep throated sound of frustration, but his partner seemed to ignore it as he ravished the tiny would his teeth left in the smoother white skin, tongue darting out to lap up the droplets of blood as they came.

"Kisame. . ." Itachi growled out as he executed a particularly hard jerk of his hips, which only resulted in the arm holding him captive against his partner's body tightening. His hands, Sasuke noticed after a moment of staring, were encased in Kisame's embrace along with his torso. Though from the way that the shark nin's lips quirked upward in the face of a tone that would have made any san shinobi fear for his safety, neither of them wanted the Uchiha to actually break free.

Kisame grinned as he continued to work his smaller partner's neck, only lifting away long enough to ask tantalizingly, "Is there something you want, Itachi-san?"

Itachi's eyelids cracked open to nail his partner with an unsatisfied glare. Below, Kisame rolled his hips teasingly, and the glare melted away. Itachi's eyes closed, and his back arched, pressing hungrily back against the movement. In response to Kisame's question, he turned his head so that his mouth was closer to his partner's ear and ground out a single word.

_"More. . . "_

Sasuke watched as Kisame's mouth trailed lazily up to his brother's jaw line, pretending not to notice the increasingly desperate body straining against his for relief. "More what?"

_"Kisame. . ." _There was a warning tone in his brother's voice, but it was forgotten when Kisame rolled his hips again, and Itachi's normally passive face contorted in an uncharacteristic mix of pleasure and need. And Sasuke came to the belated, idiotic discovery that his brother had and erection. And that he was not only sitting on Kisame's lap, he was _sitting on _him.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you," the shark nin said close to Itachi's ear, one hand releasing its hold on his partner's unblemished shoulder to trail down to one dusky nipple, "the best way to get what you want is to ask nicely?"

The lines in Itachi's forehead deepened. He didn't waste so much as a second after Kisame released his hold on his upper body. The shark nin had barely finished his mock scolding before a hand latched onto the back of his head, jerking him forward to crush his mouth against Itachi's. Sasuke felt nausea bubble up from his stomach at the sight. The glimmer of wet tongue passing from between one set of lips to the other was occasionally visible as his brother dominated his partner's mouth.

Itachi finally pulled back with his eyes still closed and erection still all but roaring for attention. Touch me," he ordered with his hand still buried possessively in the shark nin's hair. He leaned in and nipped once at Kisame's lower lip. "Now."

Kisame's hold on his partner's hip had already weakened when his attention was taken over by Itachi's kiss. Now it moved as the latter's hips began rocking. Relief only showed up momentarily on the Uchiha's face as the movement he craved finally came, then he began moving faster as Kisame's fingers closed around the part of him that had been ignored, making amends. Itachi's pace picked up speed. His hips began to trust out, slamming themselves back down onto Kisame's lap as his head once more sought support on the shark nin's shoulder. Kisame met him each time, hand vigorously working to keep up with the demanding pace being set by his younger partner.

Sasuke's eyes dilated, skewing the image of his brother repeatedly impaling himself on Kisame into fuzzy shapes amidst the sounds of pants and pleased groans. Up until he heard Kisame say his brother's name. He blinked his eyes back into focus just in time to see on set of blue fingers dig into the skin around one smooth white hip, and hear Itachi's unwilling as the other fisted around him. Kisame's eyes squeezed shut as he pulled his partner's body closer, face burying itself in midnight black hair as he released into the murderer of the Uchiha clan.

Itachi waited a moment, unmoving in the shark nin's embrace, before he covered Kisame's hand with his own. Wordlessly, he encouraged rough fingers to curl around him as he guided them to moving again. Faster and faster. . .Itachi's back began to arch, lips parting, leaning back against Kisame's teeth stroking his neck, and. . .

Sasuke's finger stabbed the off button on the VCR hard enough to make the joints pop. He ignored it as he continued to stare at the screen as if the sight of his brother approaching orgasm was still playing there. Distantly, he noted that when he drew his hand away it was shaking violently. But he remained where he was until he heard a knock on his door that made him jerk away from the television set sometime later. His wall was still up, and in his hurry to get to the door, he nearly ran into it.

"Come in!"

Kisame opened the door a second later. When his eyes landed on the wall of boxes, he peered curious at the young shinobi. "What are you doing in here?"

"Nothing," Sasuke said quickly, and then inwardly smacked himself. No other response would have been a larger confirmation that he _was_ doing something. He just stopped himself short of turning to look at the television, to make sure that it hadn't decided to make things worse by suddenly switching on.

"Are you alright?" Kisame frowned at him, and Sasuke tried desperately not to stare at the teeth he'd just seen teasing his brother's jaw line. "You look pale."

_He. . .Itachi. . .they had. . .!_

"Is there something you want?" Sasuke asked curtly, directing his eyes to somewhere over the shark nin's head since staring at him seemed impossible at the moment.

_"Is there something you want, Itachi-san. . .?"_

"The Leader summoned you," Kisame said. The undertone of concern that had been there a moment before disappeared, and Sasuke hoped that his relief wasn't too evident. "You're in."

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A/N:

( (dodges wave of rotten vegetable) ) Please don't hurt me! I swear that this IS a KisaIta fic, despite Itachi being dead. This will be shown in future chapters! This one was mainly set up, you know. Getting Sasuke settled in the Akatsuki base, establishing that both Orochimaru and Itachy are gone, etc. Hopefully if this story didn't bore you, you'll consider sticking around to see what happens next. Suggestions, criticism, and praise are all welcome. Especially that last one. Build my ego? ( (puppy face) )


	2. Chapter 2

_In every shinobi village, there was at one time or another, a preferred method of execution. Through the years after his betrayal of Konoha, Sasuke had watched his sensei study the different "secret" techniques, as the snake master had called them. Occasionally, when a pupil that had been lured from a particular village tried to leave, he would use the traitorous rookie (because rookies were the only ones who _would _try to leave) to test his favorites. On these occasions, Orochimaru liked to have an audience with him. Sometimes it was only Kabuto, sometimes others. Usually, it included Sasuke._

_The snake master had had a particular fondness for the older methods above others, some dating as far back as the original founding of a particular country. _

_He had developed the interest years ago, before leaving the Hidden Leaf for the Akatsuki. Out of all the countries, he said, the Fire Country was the last to give up its primitive executions. Rather, it changed the details for them over the years, silently altering it as technology improved. But always, the central tool of the execution remained the same: water._

_The executioners used a large tank with six thick iron walls and a door on one side. When the condemned shinobi was chained inside, the door would shut and a latch closed on the outside. A button would then be pressed, and water would begin filling the inside. But nothing was too complicated, Orochimaru would say. A well trained ninja would be able to pick the locks on their shackles, even in the total darkness inside the tank. A jutsu could be used from the inside, and the snake sannin recounted that in many cases there were reports of failed attempts to get past the walls. Summoning jutsus, mostly. And by the most intelligent, water jutsu. Breakouts were rare, and even then, ANBU squads were often in attendance outside the tank walls, waiting. But in most cases, the condemned shinobi died as he was sentenced to; in the dark, with the cold, black water filling up his lungs. An old tank could be identified by the dents that its temporary occupants left behind them. They would be the last things that the next one would see before the door closed, and the sound of rushing water drew their attention away._

_Those kinds of executions began under the Fire Country feudal lords, before the Leaf Village was formed, as punishments for traitors to the country rather than wayward ninja. And before they could build the tank, they used the ocean to drown traitors, or lakes, or ponds, or whatever was able to hold water._

_In the Water Country, the key element of execution was electricity. A traitor was strapped to a table or chair, and needles and wires hooked all along the condemned's body. In the times of civilians only, a trigger would be pulled that would make the traitor scream and convulse until blood poured from every orifice on his body, and his heart gave up beating for the strain. In other times, after the Mist village had formed and began to take in refugees, or missing nin from other villages, they would simply ask if anyone was from the Lightning County and assign the execution as a mission. They were the second to the last to give up their methods, Orochimaru said once when Sasuke made a comment about how the _Water Country_ could have learned to harness electricity before forming the Hidden Mist._

_In the Wind Country, the disobedient would be strapped to a stone in the desert and left to bake in the sun until they died of thirst under the watchful eye of jounin guards. In the Grass Village, burnings were still practiced until midway through their second kage's time. In the Stone, horses once tore traitors apart._

_It was after the last claim that Sasuke stopped listening to his sensei's reports. He said disinterestedly that he had never heard of those methods._

_In answer, Orochimaru's eyes would narrow slightly. "Of course you haven't," he would say._

_To himself, Sasuke wondered if there had been a method for the Rice Patty Country before Orochimaru appeared. Konoha had followed the elements with their supposed method. Water destroying Fire. Sound, following that order, wouldn't work. Sound is slowed by water, but not destroyed. It can't be pulled apart by animals, or weakened by electricity and heat. Sound is virtually indestructible...until its source is diminished. Because of that, a Sound shinobi would die silently as their existence came to end, but in Oto a traitor ninja or civilian was yet to die without making a sound._

_Orochimaru liked to hear people scream._

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When he was called to the Leader's office to make his initiation to the Akatsuki official, he had been asked to sign his late mentor's name on a scroll with ten other names already listed. Toward the top, Sasuke had spotted Orochimaru's signature already there, but the Leader had waved it away. "New body," he said, offering the scroll, "new name."

Sasuke hadn't understood until he asked the Leader for a pen, and was told, "You don't sign in ink." Then after a brief pause, during which Sasuke wasn't sure if he was being watched with suspicion or amusement, "Have you forgotten?"

Orochimaru hadn't told him about the Leader. Sasuke suspected that it was either because he honestly didn't know about the Leader, what his area of expertise was, where he came from, why his eyes stood out so sharply when the rest of his face was covered in shadow; or because of a suppressed sense of intimidation.

When Sasuke left the office in the humid lower tunnels, his thumb was bandaged and he was struck by the thought that joining a band of S-rank criminals was remarkably similar to joining a group of excitable schoolboys. Prick your finger, sign your name. Only here, Kisame said to him in the halls after, the blood wasn't a show. Its purpose was so that if anyone left the organization, the Leader would be able to find them again. There were jutsu's that could be done with dried blood to locate someone on a map, even if it were only as much blood as could be scraped off a piece of paper. The shark hadn't told him about the jutsu though, and the younger ninja decided not to tell him that he had already seen Orochimaru use one like it before. It was useful for tracking down ninja on missions that unexpectedly needed reinforcements. Or hunting down runaways.

In his hand, Sasuke held the small metal ring that he had once seen adorning the finger of a gnarled hand that Orochimaru had kept in his office. Kisame said that he had been sent to retrieve it when Orochimaru was killed, a bonus that he insisted had not been planned.

After his initiation, Sasuke's daily routine lifted from steady boredom to constant travel. The missions that he was sent out on were easy at first, and always with Kisame accompanying him. As his partner, the shark nin said, but Sasuke suspected that the former Kiri nin's role could be better described as an examiner during their first missions together. Their assignments began to get more complicated later, when Sasuke assumed that he had earned the shark nin's seal of approval. But when Kisame said that he was his "partner" Sasuke realized later that he had only meant temporarily. During his fourth week in the Akatsuki, someone else would be waiting in the Leader's office when he arrived to for briefings instead of his brother's partner. On these occasions, his missions would be mercifully shorter and the work less physical than it was observational. He was uncomfortable when he was sent out with the more eccentric members who he couldn't be sure whether they would have annoyed or intrigued his former master. He understood why he was sent out with them though; the Leader was trying to place him with his ideal partner.

On these missions, Sasuke spent most of the idle time silent. He completed the task that his brother's organization gave him, and then strove to avoid conversation that might give him away, and ignored the feeling in his gut that told him this was not what Orochimaru would do. If he followed that feeling too far, Sasuke knew that he would come to the fact that Orochimaru, no matter what turn the war in the Sound might have taken, would no sooner have returned to the Akatsuki than he would the Leaf. Orochimaru was not one to put himself in a position where he would be judged.

Sasuke preferred the longer missions with Kisame. The silence between them persisted as unfalteringly as it had during their trek to the Akatsuki base, and only increased with the one-sided awkwardness that came from the image of Uchiha Itachi desperately moaning the shark nin's name as he rode the blue man's body for all he was worth. But along with that...there was a reluctant trust that came from the fact that Kisame was the only person standing between him and the cautious sidelong glances of the other Akatsuki members.

On the mornings that Sasuke was not called to the Leader's office to discuss his next mission, he fell into the habit of drawing out his time in bed, listening to the peculiar quiet that occupied the Akatsuki tunnels during the early morning. Presumably, Deidara was a late riser. Always, Sasuke's eyes found their way to the stacks of unneeded belongings. Orochimaru's boxes still lined the walls of the tiny room, seeming to stare down mockingly at him during his idle moments. Since his initiation he had refused the urge to paw through them again.

Somehow during those mornings, his attention always seemed to linger on one.

The television set was once again effectively hidden under a dozen boxes arranged into a perfect cube around the offending device. But his efforts were in vain. All through his first month of official membership, Sasuke still woke up with the image of sharp teeth digging into white skin in his head and the sound of breath hissing out in something besides anger or pain.

During the second, he took to sleeping with his face to the wall, and received his first true glare from Deidara when he was accused of taking a shower every four hours. He was in his third month as an Akatsuki member when he finally got out of bed without clutching his head. He got dressed in the clothing that still stubbornly held the faintest scent of a shampoo brand that neither Sasuke nor Orochimaru had ever used, and then turned to where he had stacked his late master's boxes around the television set. He picked the one he had put in the back corner closest to wall in a failed effort to keep himself from looking at it, and then went out into the hallway.

Despite living in the mountain labyrinth for three months, Sasuke's familiarity with the tunnels was not developed enough for him to feel comfortable wandering through them alone. But he knew his way to the mountain entrance; he had made sure of that before he had begun receiving missions. The faint odor of mothballs wafted up from under the weathered cardboard flaps of Orochimaru's box as Sasuke began down the hallway. He was turning the corner when someone called to him.

"Oro?"

Sasuke peered over his shoulder. Down the hall, Kisame was coming out of his room. For a moment the shark nin's eyes stayed on Sasuke's face, then as he came closer, fell down to the box, and a confused expression came onto the blue features. "What are you doing with that?"

Sasuke kept his face blank. He had an urge to look down at the box to make sure that the tape hadn't found some way to slither out from under the layers of clothes and push the flaps open, but resisted. "I'm throwing something away."

The shark nin pressed on, "What?"

"Just some old clothes," Sasuke answered. Shifting the box's weight to one hand, he gestured toward his chest with the other. "They don't fit very well…_anymore_."

The former Kiri nin's eyes lingered on the light brown surface for a moment longer. Then, "That's all?"

Unintentionally, Sasuke's fingers dug into the yielding cardboard. "Hai."

Kisame's head turned slightly, just enough for him to glance down the hallway that he had come from, then taking a step closer to the Uchiha, said in a low voice, "You can't throw away the uniform. It's against regulations."

Sasuke blinked.

Kisame shrugged as if to say that the rule sounded odd to him as well, but explained, "A few countries have suspicions about our location, but so long as no one finds proof that we're here, the feudal lord keeps ANBU squad away from civilian areas."

"Civilians?"

"Yeah, civilians." Kisame grinned. "There's a village nearby, a small one. Didn't you wonder what we do on our days off?" Not expecting an answer, Kisame pointed down at Sasuke's box, and said easily, "But anyway, if you want to get rid of that, I'll tell you where to go. You know fire jutsu, right?"

Sasuke nodded up to the larger shinobi.

"Good."

Kisame directed Sasuke down another tunnel before he left him to navigate his way through the labyrinth on his own. Something in the smaller ninja's expression must have hinted at his reluctance to go into the tunnels alone, because after a brief pause, Kisame added onto his instructions, "You'll know you're going the right way if the tunnels start to get a little tight. There have been a few…adjustments that we've had to make since moving in here. You'll also feel like you're going down for a while before you go up. Got it?"

Sasuke glanced down the crude stony hallway, into the darkness that the sparse lighting couldn't remove.

There was a longer pause than before. Then, "Do you want me to show you?"

Kisame's voice came out hesitantly, but Sasuke couldn't be sure when he looked back at him whether it was out of his expected refusal or a genuine reluctance to ask the question. "I'll be fine," he said back.

"You're sure?"

Sasuke turned to start walking, leaving the shark ninja behind him. "Hai."

Sharingan activated, Sasuke walked through the tunnels with his vision tinged red, watching the chakra signatures of the Akatsuki members grow fainter as he followed his sometimes partner's directions. First he felt the steep decline as he followed the stone pathway to where the air just began to warm, and then turned a corner that brought him upward. The walls constricted around him a short while later, and looking at them, Sasuke realized that that was because whoever made the tunnel that lead downward hadn't made the one that went up. The walls were cruder and the ceiling jutted downward unexpectedly in places. It suggested that the upward tunnel had been made hastily by someone who had either been frightfully thin or didn't mind a few dozen throbbing scratches on his arms.

The light became scarcer as Sasuke went into what he assumed were less used hallways. When the tunnel finally led into one of the older, properly spaced passageways, he was squinting to see, even with his Sharingan activated in the lack of light. He put his hand on the wall as he turned another corner, looking for a change in texture that Kisame had told him to feel for. Kisame was familiar with directing people with poor eyesight, it seemed.

He couldn't see any cracks of light along the floor when he looked for them, but then, Kisame had mentioned that there likely wouldn't be any. He knew that he had found the door that he was looking for when his hand brushed wood, snugly fitted in along side the stone. Setting down Orochimaru's box, Sasuke stopped in front of it and felt along until he outlined the wooden rectangle. Larger than him, Sasuke noted, but still too short to accommodate some of the Akatsuki members. When his hand found the handle, Sasuke pushed with his shoulder until the door reluctantly let him through, flooding the dark hallway with pristine midmorning light that made his pupils ache after straining to see in the tunnels for so long. Deactivating his Sharingan to avoid a headache later, Sasuke picked up his box again and stepped outside.

The door led out onto a narrow flat shelf on the western side of the mountain. Sasuke walked along a small path on the side of the shelf to get to a wider spot where he could burn the box of clothing and the tape buried at its center. Glancing over the side once, he could see the faintest outline of the path that Kisame had darted from when he first brought him to the Akatsuki base, then beyond that, the flat landscaping of the River Country.

However, his attention was drawn away from the scenery and evidence of just how high into the mountain's the base went when he took a step forward and felt the gravel under his foot slide dangerously to one side. Glancing down, he found a crater as large as his head in the centre of the path. Then another one a short distance away. A larger one was directly in the side of the wall, a large crack that still had rock and dirt scattered on the ground below it as if it had been blasted out of place.

Sasuke guessed that Deidara must frequent this part of the base.

He stopped when he thought he had found the largest part of the narrow walkway he could hope to come by. Setting the box down, Sasuke began to make the familiar seals of the Uchiha clan's signature move that he had learned so long ago in the Fire Country. He held his breath. When he had first tried to turn his breath into fire, the alarming warmth that had compiled in his chest had made him nervous, so that while he did the seals he let it slowly slip out his nose. As a result, the first fire ball produced had been shrunken and last for only a few seconds before he ran out of breath. His father had been disappointed. During the tries that followed, Sasuke had curiously wondered whether Itachi had shied away from the feeling that his lungs were baking inside his chest, or if he had embraced it from the start. While he was practicing, Itachi hadn't been around for him to ask. His brother had missions to do, training hours to meet, responsibilities that kept him too busy to elaborate on the inner workings of the jutsu any more than their father had: hold your breath, do the seals, and exhale. Sasuke had to learn on his own to curve his tongue as if he were trying to whistle, to hold his breath in until the last possible moment, and that it was better to blow out in one quick breath unless he wanted the flames to lap back at his chin and hair. But even if Itachi had been available, Sasuke liked to think that he wouldn't have asked for his help anyway. It had been his first and only conscious attempt at winning their father's attention away from the favoured older son.

He never had the chance to make a second.

Sasuke's hands froze on the last seal with three fingers posed in front of his mouth as if he were holding one of the plastic wands that children used to blow bubbles in soapy water. The other fingers were held out of the way so that they wouldn't be burned. In his chest, he could feel the heat coiled in his lungs, building as it waited to be exhaled in one fiery breath. As a child first learning the move, Sasuke had been afraid that if he held his breath for too long after completing the seals, his lungs would burn up from the inside. By placing a question to his academy teacher, he learned that damage to his lungs was virtually impossible. Fire needed oxygen to burn, and until the chakra in his breath hit the air, he was safe. And as for holding it, he was told that if he managed to hold his breath that long, the warmth would simply die out and leave him completely unharmed, if dangerously close to suffocating.

Parting his lips, Sasuke angled his head at the box. When he had come back to Orochimaru's tiny room, he had discovered that the VCR had already rewound the tape for him, and had it waiting sinisterly in the slot to be pushed back in and played from the beginning. Orochimaru must have programmed it to do that. Sasuke had taken the cassette and buried it back in the half empty box he left on his floor and promptly set about his resolve to pretend it wasn't there.

Sasuke watched the orange-red wisps attack the withered cardboard when he finally let his breath out. The box had to have been at least six years old. It burned quickly. The stones behind the box were singed in the process to a solid, inky black by the time that Sasuke's ran out of breath.

The shielding shape of the mountain blocked off whatever wind that might have been blowing that day, so that as Sasuke watched the box's surface turn to curling black ashes, the smoke billowed up in a clean skyward stream, thinning only for a moment when the flames ate into the clothing before the fabric caught. If there was another sign that indicated difficulty when the fire burned through to the plastic video cassette at the box's centre, he didn't see it.

When there was nothing more than a pile of smouldering ashes on the gravely path, Sasuke had an urge to paw through them in case the plastic hadn't burned away. But there were no trees growing this far up on the mountain to provide sticks, nor any large rocks that Sasuke could see around him that could be used to sift through the glowing embers. He looked up to see if there might have been anything caught or growing higher on the mountain side that he could climb to, and then froze when he spotted the edge of something black and red peeking around a pile of rocks that might have been made by an explosive that was planted to too high on the mountain and had only missed crashing into the path by sheer luck.

Sasuke gasped.

"Hello?" he called up after a moment, but there was no response. The red and black fabric did not move out of sight suddenly, or come into view as its wearer reacted. Instead it stayed perfectly still; outlining one side of the boulder it peeked from.

Frowning, Sasuke stepped around the ashes of Orochimaru's old clothing to get a better view of what was undoubtedly an Akatsuki cloak. For a moment, he though that maybe Deidara had left his cloak behind when he had been causing the craters in the mountain side, but shook it away. If Akatsuki members were told not to throw their uniforms away, than they were likely cautioned against taking them off lightly this close to the base.

Summoning chakra into his feet, Sasuke pulled himself up onto the higher ledge with its gravely ground made up of loose dirt and rocks of varying sizes, then picked his way to the one boulder that the cloak was stationed behind. The first thing his eyes landed on was a three-bladed scythe laying neatly across several uneven stones in front of an Akatsuki member whom Sasuke had only seen a handful of times in the lower tunnels. He was sitting cross-legged with his back to the stone, eyes closed. The man was tall with pinkish skin that suggested if given enough time in the sun, its owner would tan easily. His hair was light coloured and had been combed back away from his face. If Orochimaru had ever mentioned him, than he had not bothered to give either of those details.

Between the man's weapon and his feet, Sasuke saw a small book with its title side facing downward. One hand was being held close to his face, a string of plain looking beads wrapped loosely around his fist and wrist as he bent his head toward it.

He must have heard Sasuke when he came near. The hand that wasn't holding up the beads twitched where it rested on his knee, in easy reach of his scythe. But the man ignored him. The Uchiha stayed stationed where he was, just a little to the side, and watched as the Akatsuki member's lips worked out the strange syllables that were spoken too softly for him to hear and drawn out so that he couldn't be sure of the language. If it weren't for the fact that he was staring at an S-rank criminal, Sasuke would have shrugged the scene off. But he had assumed over the years that missing nin, by an unspoken rule, did not concern themselves with praying.

After several minutes of watching, half expecting to see was of the smooth eyelids crack open and stare back at him, Sasuke stepped away from the boulder. It was still early, and Sasuke wanted to get back to his room before the other Akatsuki members came back from wherever it was they went to during the morning. He picked his way back along the rocky earth, then down to were the box full of Orochimaru's old clothing was nothing more than a pile of cooled ash. He paused for a minute to think of the video tape that he had meant to check for when he noticed the cloak behind the boulder, but then went on. Even if the plastic hadn't burned, the film inside it would have been ruined beyond salvaging after the fire.

Sasuke went back into the tunnels, pulling the door that he suspected might have been made too large for its frame, back into place behind him. Once again, he had to activate his Sharingan and tint his vision red to help his eyes readjust to the dimness of the stone hallways. He reached his hand out like a blind man and let it brush lightly against the walls beside him until they began to grow tight around him again. At some point before then, he began hearing pebbles moving in the hallway as someone walked down the tunnel behind him. He heard the steps come closer, and assumed from the fact that they were not deliberately trailing him but just trying to make their way down to the light passageways. Sasuke didn't jump when several minutes later he saw the chakra signature hovering thickly in the air around him, telling him that its source was coming closer.

It was only when Sasuke heard a chipper, "Good morning!" from the space behind him that he turned his head and saw the same light haired man from outside walking a little ways back. He was close enough for Sasuke to see the thin eyebrows under the man's forehead, and the three-bladed shape of the scythe peeking from over his shoulder.

Sasuke didn't slow down, but the man's legs were longer and using their superior length to take larger strides. Within moments Sasuke could see that the man was trying to pass him, but in the narrowing downward tunnel, could not do so without first drawing the Uchiha's attention. Sasuke obligingly stopped walking for a second and let the other man pass, thinking to let the man with his wider steps disappear as quickly as possible. A lock of silvery hair fell into the taller man's face and was tucked back behind the man's ear as he passed by. By chance, the man looked back as replaced it and caught Sasuke's stare riveted on the beads still encircling the his wrist.

He smiled. "Leader-sama has informed me that you'll be going on a mission with Kakuzu next."

Falling back into step, Sasuke answered him flatly, "I haven't been told what my next mission will be."

"Oh, I'm sorry," the blonde man said lightly. Sasuke noticed that his steps seemed to have shrunk now that he was in the lead in the narrow passageway. "But if you do get partnered with Kakuzu, don't let him take a detour. If you say yes, even once, he'll want you to do it again. He really has a knack for taking up time."

"Does he?" Sasuke said disinterestedly. He pulled his arms in close to his body to keep from scraping them against jagged points that reached out from the surrounding walls. In front of him, his companion was partially turned so that he looked as if he were sidestepping with his broader shoulders.

"Yes. He managed to stretch a simple retrieval mission out over two months while he went chasing after someone in his bingo book. I don't know why he insists on using that thing. It seems rather traitorous since w_e're _all listed in it, don't you agree?" The taller man glanced cheerfully back over his shoulder.

"It shouldn't matter if you're observant enough to know who he's hunting." While he answered, Sasuke watched the other man's expression carefully, mindful that other than Kisame, he had successfully managed to avoid exchanging more than the briefest sentences with the members of the Akatsuki. He wondered, inwardly, if there were supposed to be a subtle message or threat that the silver haired man was trying to convey to him by bringing up the bingo book used by bounty hunters.

"True, true," the man was agreeing. "All the same, be careful working with Kakuzu. He might keep you out for awhile otherwise."

"I'm sure I'll be alright."

For a moment, Sasuke thought that it would be quiet after he made his last comment, but he was wrong. As soon as the tunnels began to ease back again, the blonde man dropped back to walk beside Sasuke. He looked down and asked him, "Are you religious?"

Sasuke blinked. "Excuse me?"

A lump travelled up the taller man's sleeve as he pulled his arm into the main body of his cloak; Sasuke frowned as he watched it. A moment later, the lump went back down. With his bead-wrapped hand, he held what Sasuke recognized as the book that had been on the ground a few minutes ago when he saw the man outside.

"What are your views on faith?" the man asked cheerfully.

Sasuke continued to stare at the S-rank criminal, likely a murderer of some shape or form, if his scythe meant anything. Again, Sasuke thought of what he knew of the shinobi he had known both in the Leaf and in the Sound. Most had generally not thought of the afterlife beyond sending others to it. But he did not let that show on his face as he attempted to say this to the man walking beside him, only to be interrupted.

"Have you ever heard of the jashin, the true faith?"

"No." Sasuke tried to make his voice sound as discouraging as he could, but the other man seemed to have no problems with it.

"Ah, then I should have sought you out sooner!"

They were coming to the end of their downward trek. Soon they would be going back up the tunnel and toward the dormitory hallway, where Sasuke had last seen his brother's partner. He inwardly wished that he had considered taking the shark nin up on his offer to escort him, if only so that he would have Kisame with him now, to explain the excited glint that he saw coming into the silver haired man's pale eyes.

As the man talked, Sasuke listed the shinobi that his late sensei had named for him before he left the Sound. The man he was talking to was well spoken, and appeared to a have a very wide vocabulary for describing certain aspects of his religion, which the younger ninja guess as he noted how the fair shinobi gestured repeatedly toward his book, had likely been picked up from the fervent study of that religion. He guessed that he must have been from a clan of some sort before leaving his original village.

Sasuke let his Sharingan fade away as they came to the more liberally lighted passageways that the Akatsuki members used most often. Beside him, the stranger was still talking:

"...and you see, that's what life has really always been about! The destruction of everything, pure or impure. It's human nature, and we aren't meant to fight it, we're made that way for a reason, after all! It's all very simple."

"I see," Sasuke said as the taller man led him around another corner while waving one hand to emphasize his point. But Sasuke wasn't aware that he was being led until the air around him began to grow damp and warm, and the decline in the floor beneath his feet took on a sharp angle.

"It gets a bit steeper right here," his guide told him over his shoulder as he strode on ahead with a particular easiness to his stride that suggested this slope was walked over often.

Sasuke stopped when he realized that he wasn't sure where he was. Behind the other shinobi's back, he glanced back down the hall that they had come from. In front of him, the older shinobi was disappearing down the sloping path. "Are you coming?" he called back, "It's already started!"

He had to go slower down the tunnel when it came to its abrupt decline that his guide had warned him to watch out for. In addition to being steep, he found out the path was also damp from the hot air that rose up from the hot springs Sasuke guessed were somewhere nearby. At the bottom of the tunnel, he saw a wide gap of missing stone emitting light that rose up to waist height. Coming closer, he could sense several chakra signatures wafting out from within, and then heard the sound of something crashing loudly against something else. A voice said something, and then it was quiet.

Bending down, Sasuke first peered into the opening, only to be confronted by the smiling pale eyes of his guide, looking back up at him from within a room below.

"There you are!" He gestured downward, "There isn't anyone here planning to bite you, come in."

Sasuke stared down in confusion for a moment before he complied by getting down on his knees and ducking under the hole in the wall and into the brightly lit room, which he realized was so oddly connected to the tunnel because it was set with a floor lower than the tunnels above it. As he looked around, he also noticed that the room's lighting seemed to come from another, much larger room connected to it.

The blonde man was still standing beside him. Sasuke looked up to the taller man, trying to think of how he was going to find out how to get back to the dormitory hallway without giving away that he did not know his way around the tunnels. But then, the other man turned to Sasuke and said, "It was a pleasure meeting you...Sasuke, was it?"

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Upon ducking into the little room that Sasuke had been led to by his curious, silver haired guide, he noticed that three other people were already sitting along the mismatched stone counter at the opposite side. After the mysterious person he found meditating on the side of the mountain stunned Sasuke by saying his name casually and painfully audibly by the door way, the religious fanatic turned away and left Sasuke with his jaw clamped shut in surprise. Unaware of the anxiety that he had created, he went to the farthest corner on the left hand side of the counter and leaned against the wall beside a larger agent wearing a pale violet cloth over his head. When he turned in response to something that the silver haired agent said, Sasuke saw that there was also a mask covering the frontal portions of the man's face from chin to nose. Sasuke didn't recognize him.

A few space over, Zetsu sat to the side of the unnamed masked shinobi, quietly staring down over the edge of the counter at the seemingly vast empty space beyond it. He didn't seem to notice his two comrades sitting in the corner, or hear the irritated grunt when the masked nin waved aside something their other comrade said and turned back to a small book that laid open on the counter. Attention still on Zetsu, Sasuke stepped forward curiously and peered over the former Grass nin's shoulder into what he realized was a much larger room beyond it.

It was a second later that Sasuke turned his attention to the other agent present when he felt his neck hairs stand on end in the way that told him he was being watched. He heard the sound of glass tapping against glass, and suspected that it was deliberately made loud enough to here over the bickering of his guide and his large companion. Looking to the side, he saw the familiar cerulean profile of his late brother's partner down the counter. Kisame was pouring himself a drink from a white jar on the counter. Their eyes met briefly while the shark nin pretended to watch whatever it was that apparently had the attention of both Zetsu and the masked man on the other side of the ledge-like counter. Even in the sidelong look, Sasuke thought he could interpret the question that Kisame was inwardly asking himself. _"What are you doing here?"_

Below the ledge, Sasuke heard what sounded like an explosion, and then another sound following it that suggested something solid had just made contact with something not so solid.

Sasuke went to where Kisame was sitting, glancing curiously over the other side of the counter as he made his way. He saw two shapes at first, zooming around on the space below. One was clothed completely in black as he clung to the far wall. His face was covered, but the familiar designs on the missing nin's mask identified him just as clearly. The other was a black and yellow blur as it raced toward the first. It was only when Tobi ducked suddenly to the side and the blond shinobi's fist was caught at the wrist in a black-gloved hand that Sasuke was able to recognize him a Deidara.

When he was standing beside the shark nin, Sasuke tore his attention away to hiss quietly, "Someone knows."

Kisame's didn't appear startled. He calmly replaced the jar he was still holding on the counter top and raised a tiny cup to his mouth. While the cup hid his lips, he asked back, "Who?"

A pause. Sasuke was still looking down at the two comrades below so not to draw attention. A missed kick on Tobi's part caused a small burst of pebbles to break away from the stone walls, but as they hit the ground they sent up small splashes from the murky black cavern floor. Instead of answering the question right away, the Uchiha first asked dimly, "Are they standing on a hot spring?"

Kisame sounded slightly annoyed when he answered, "Yes. Who found out?"

Deidara was pulling himself up onto the wall, trying to distance himself from the hot water below, where Tobi appeared to be expecting an attack as he scanned the water around him from atop a pile of rocks that rose just above the surface, rather than the blond situating himself on the stone.

To the shark nin, Sasuke said, "The one with the scythe, over in the corner."

"Hidan." Kisame didn't need turn around to see who Sasuke meant. There was a sound from the former Kiri nin that made Sasuke glance at him through corner of his eye. Kisame rarely smiled in his presence, but when he went on to answer the uncertain look the younger ninja was giving him, there was a sound behind his voice that could almost have been called a chuckle. "He would figure out you weren't Orochimaru. He spent two years trying to convert him."

Hidan. Orochimaru had mentioned him. More thoughtful than Deidara, less anchored than Kisame. _"The only man who thinks the word "genocide" fits into light conversation." _

"What should we do?"

More clearly than the fight in the room below, Sasuke could hear Hidan talking to the only remaining unnamed ninja, who Sasuke thought after sneaking another glance toward them, actually looked too large to fit through most of the tunnels.

"You don't know if Tobi's going to lose," Hidan was saying loudly for the other Akatsuki members to hear.

His conversation partner sounded only vaguely interested as he answered back, "Tobi is getting full of himself and Deidara's getting pissed. He's going to be torn apart."

"But Deidara loses focus when he gets angry!" Hidan insisted.

The masked man grumbled audibly, but Sasuke didn't follow the conversation further. Instead, he turned to Kisame and repeated his question when another explosion erupted beside Tobi's rock, sending up water that the Akatsuki scout dove to get away from.

Kisame shrugged. "Nothing."

Tobi leapt to a higher rock pile some feet away from his first, but its stones were less firmly compiled and he was forced to jump away again when the stone he landed on slid loose under his weight. A shuriken came flying at the spiral-masked nin while he was in midair.

Sasuke stared mutely at his brother's partner before repeating, _"Nothing?"_

"Yeah," the shark nin casually began pouring himself another cup full of the clear liquid inside jar set on the counter between Zetsu and himself.

Sasuke waited for another noise to come up from the fight below. When it came, he asked lowly, "Are you drunk?"

He was answered with another almost chuckle, followed by, "Of course not. It's not even noon yet." Then, not waiting for another distracting noise from below, "Didn't you hear about Hidan's religion? He wouldn't care if you killed Leader-sama himself. So long as you don't insult his gods."

Sasuke looked back at the silver haired man in the corner, glaring at the man sitting beside him with the cloth wrapped around his head. "Who's that with him?"

Calmly, Kisame took a sip of his unknown drink. "Kakuzu, Hidan's partner."

Orochimaru had never gotten to mentioning that name during their years together. The man was still wearing his cloak in addition to the cloth over his head and the mask, even with the hot springs below expelling stream that rose and accumulated inside their box-like room. On the ground beside him, his partner had already shed his cloak and folded it neatly on the swept stone floor. Looking at Kisame, Sasuke realized the Kiri ninja had also stripped off the heavy trademark garment of their organization. Tobi and Deidara were both fully clothed as they skidded across the surface of the hot spring, for reasons that Sasuke couldn't fathom. From the way that the Iwa nin's cloak seemed to move slowly and more heavily around the hems than it was supposed to, it looked as if he had already been splashed recently in the hot water.

As Sasuke watched them, he felt the shark nin's gaze come to rest on his profile. "Confused?" he asked.

Sasuke didn't turn his head. "Why are they fighting?"

Kisame took another sip from his cup. "Leader-sama's orders."

A massive splash made the water level below seem to lower for a moment when Tobi executed a series of seals that made a giant stream of water rise up in the shape of a snarling dragon that Sasuke had seen twice before during his days as a genin. As he stared, he saw Deidara's one eye widen momentarily at the gaping, watery mouth before he broke into a run for the ceiling. The dragon followed him upward, the spring water seeming to lower again as the creature's neck grew longer.

"After a mission a few years ago," Kisame went on as Tobi's jutsu pursued the blond ninja in front of them, "Deidara lost both his arms. It was during our—"  
"During your first attempt to capture Gaara of the Desert."

Kisame nodded. Sasuke couldn't tell if he was surprised that he knew about any of the Akatsuki missions to retrieve the demon possessed. "We were able to reattach one of his arms afterward, but the other one..." The shark nin shrugged once again and nodded toward the wall where the dragon was herding his blond comrade. "Take a look."

Sasuke had already worked with the blond haired shinobi once during the Leader's experimentations with his mission partners. They had been sent to observe the feudal lord of the River Country; supposedly, there had been whisperings of other countries pressuring for permission to search for missing nin within their borders. During their stakeout, Sasuke had sat silently beside the former Stone Country ninja, ignoring the not quite subtle expression of mistrust and the stark difference between the cheerful comrade that had greeted Kisame when they returned from the Sound and the person who he was assigned to work with during the surveillance. To the best of Sasuke's memory, Deidara had had two arms hidden under his cloak then.

In the present, he watched the blond ninja carefully as he crouched near the ceiling, unable to go higher to escape the steaming dragon preparing to lunge for him.

"Watch his hands," Kisame said softly.

Deidara brought up his hands as the dragon's head came rushing toward him, moving rapidly in a series of seals that were vaguely familiar from a time before.

"What about them?"

"Can't you see it from here?" There was a small clicking sound that indicated Kisame was pouring himself another drink, but before that, Sasuke heard a snicker. "One of his arms isn't real. We had to replace it with a puppet limb."

In the other room, there was a puff of pale lavender smoke near the ceiling that Sasuke hardly noticed as he turned his head around to glare at the blue man sitting next to him.

Kisame ignored it.

Water came rushing back down into the spring as Tobi's dragon crashed into the now unoccupied space on the wall. Simultaneously, a sudden cry of surprise indicated that Deidara had just teleported behind the masked ninja. Sasuke could hear the splashing as the two struggled against each other while molding chakra into their feet to keep them above the surface of the spring.

Kakuzu, on the other side of the room with his partner still sitting on the counter beside his bingo book, snickered loudly," Your religion lets you murder, maim, and destroy, but you're not allowed to place a simple _bet?"_

"Destruction is different from gambling."

Ignoring them, Sasuke asked again, "How does that explain why they're fighting each other?" He was still watching as the shark nin calmly drained his glass. Despite the assurance from earlier, Sasuke wondered how many his brother's partner had drunk before Hidan led him here.

"They fight so Deidara can practice," Kisame said when he put his cup back down. "Before he lost his arm, Deidara's best attacks involved making clay statues with the mouths on his hands," he explained, voice not quite as low as it had been before now that Hidan and Kakuzu were distracting one another more audibly. "But after he lost the arm, he couldn't shape the clay as quickly as he could before. This was Leader-sama's solution."

Tobi had one arm latched onto his opponent's shoulder from behind. Sasuke could see the other hand wrapped around the blond nin's wrist, trying to keep it from being used to throw him off. Behind him, however, the faintest sign of movement could be seen as what appeared to be a tiny bird fluttered silently into place behind the masked shinobi's back.

"And why are they on the water?"

Another chuckle came, and this time Sasuke was sure of what it was. "Have you ever tried sparring while walking on two hundred and eighty-five degree water?"

A loud scream sounded up when Deidara's bird dropped suddenly dropped into the water. Tobi's larger body holding Deidara's captive served as a shield when the clay bird blew up, sending a wave of water onto the scout's back.

Distracted by the lingering pain, Deidara simply stepped out of the Tobi's lax hold. The black clad figure swayed above the water's surface so that even where Sasuke was standing above them, he could see. Deidara grabbed him by the collar of his dark jacket, of which Sasuke was still not certain how he could stand to wear so close to the hot spring. He followed Tobi for a few minutes with his eyes as the older ninja struggled against Deidara's hold.

After a moment, he asked, "Where is he from?"

"Deidara?" Kisame asked back conversationally. The blond nin was currently holding a kunai to his opponent's throat. He didn't seem to notice that the water behind him was beginning to ripple.

"No." He knew where Deidara was from; he wore his hitai-ate in plain sight. "Tobi."

That got the former Mist shinobi to stiffen. Even with his head turned, Sasuke could still notice the change. "What makes you ask?"

Sasuke kept his eyes focused on the dark water below, were a shape was just visible near the surface. Tobi was stepping back, leading an unknowing Deidara toward the stone wall a little bit at a time. The blond was still holding onto his collar, and seemed to think that he was the one driving the scout. "I've never seen someone from the Grass Country use water jutsu."

"Tobi sees a lot of places with Zetsu," Kisame said quietly, and a bit more sharply than before. It wasn't until Sasuke turned his head that he noticed the large green leaves over the former Kiri nin's shoulder and remembered that the other Akatsuki members were still close enough to hear him if he asked a question that would seem distinctly odd coming from a old comrade.

He turned back toward the fight, leaning forward to get a better view of Tobi pressed to the wall directly below them. He thought for a minute that he could see Hidan's shoulder leaning out as well around Kisame and Zetsu's profiles.

"And you didn't teach him?"

Tobi reached out with his previously limp hand and caught Deidara's wrist while the blond's head was pulled back by a seemingly identical one behind him. A water clone's arms encircled the former Iwa ninja and pulled him back tightly against his body, which Deidara's pained expression indicated was just as hot as the water it was made from. Twisting the slighter Akatsuki member's arm, Tobi pressed the tip of the other nin's kunai into the hollow of his throat.

Even with his face turning a boiled pink from the heat, the blue eyes managed to narrow in a glare. Tobi had won.

"Tobi is a very...talented observer," Kisame conceded beside him.

Looking to the shark nin for a more informative answer, Sasuke turned his head in time to see the green leaves behind his cerulean head sink downward and seemingly disappear into the stone floor of the lounge. He was still frowning at the ground in confusion and phrasing a question in his head to ask the former Mist nin, when there was a startled yelp that came up from below. Because of the highness of the pitch, Sasuke guess that it came from Deidara, rather than Tobi with his deeper voice.

When he looked back down, it was to see Zetsu walking out onto the water toward his student. But Deidara wrenched his arm away from the real Tobi's grasp before Zetsu reached them, and pointed an accusing finger back at both the clone and the original him. "He cheated, un! I already won before he used that clone!"

The long yellow bangs that covered half of Deidara's face were obscured from the fight and steam, and for the first time Sasuke was able to see that they had been arranged to fall across his face that way for a reason. While the former Iwa ninja's head whipped to the side to glare back at his opponent, he got a momentary glimpse of something hidden under the bangs that was decidedly not another blue eye.

If Kisame noticed him staring, he decided not to comment.

Tobi seemed to have a better control over his volume when he defended himself, making listening to him from the ledge more of a strain. It was the suppressed rigidity that made him audible. "I made that clone before he pinned me, Zetsu-san. It's not my fault he didn't notice!"

A growling noise came from Deidara that might have been translatable into a disgruntled "un." Both the scout and the Akatsuki agent had their heads turned toward Zetsu, as if he were the moderator in their argument. But Zetsu, in response to the looks, had stopped walking several paces back and stood watching patiently, as if the fight between his pupil and comrade did not affect him in the slightest. It was another voice that came neither from the ledge, nor from the green figure standing closest to the bickering pair, that decided.

"Tobi won."

Zetsu and Tobi stayed as they were when they heard the voice. In contrast, Deidara straightened and turned around as if being called to attention. As Sasuke watched, he saw ripples appearing from off to one side, beyond the extent that the ledge allowed onlookers to see. He couldn't read Deidara's expression with the other's bang blocking off the side of his face that was presented toward the lounge. Then...

With a not completely acknowledged sense of discomfort, Sasuke watched Sasori's form appear from beyond the ledge. During the months after his arrival, Sasuke had managed to follow Kisame's advice about staying away from the puppet master. But even if the shark hadn't told him to, Sasuke would have made an effort to avoid Sasori all the same. As partners, Orochimaru and Sasori would have been close, if only close enough to establish a mutual disliking for one another.

Orochimaru had described his appearance as resembling _"the plaything of a rich civilian's spoiled offspring."_

Sasuke realized after coming to the organization that the description was not all that inaccurate. There were things about Sasori's appearance that didn't seem right when he was viewed in full lighting. There was something about the way it reflected off his skin that was too clear or too bright for regular outer tissue. Before his alleged death his appearance was supposed to have been indecipherable from a normal human being's, but after his revival, however that had been done, he had been left with a pale undertone to his skin suggested his body was no longer quite living.

If Deidara had been expected to quietly accept his partner's ruling, he had apparently not been informed. As Sasori came forward, reaching out for Deidara's left arm and pulling back the sleeve, the blond gestured with the other as he argued his case. From where Sasuke was standing, it seemed that the red haired puppet neither responded nor listened to his partner's rambling, as he turned the other's arm over and flexed each finger in turn, then did the same to his wrist. It occurred to Sasuke after a moment that if Deidara's arm was a replica of his original, Sasori must have been the one to make it.

The red haired puppet looked small standing next to Deidara. Orochimaru claimed that the former legendary puppeteer of Suna had only been fourteen when he converted his body into what it was now, permanently pausing the aging process. With his head turned downward, standing perfectly still as he examined the false limb, Sasori _could _have been a figurine set up beside the fidgeting, taller shinobi.

After a moment Sasori turned his face upward, letting the light reflect off his forehead, nose, and cheek in that way that was too bright, said a short sentence that didn't carry up to the ledge, and then turned back to his task. Deidara was pouting. A few feet away, Tobi's posture changed triumphantly even as he was facing his master and nodding along to whatever the ex-Grass nin was saying.

"He's going to be coming up here in a minute," Kisame said beside him, and Sasuke knew which of the four he meant.

Sasori dropped his partner's hand a moment later, and Sasuke saw his lips move as he motioned toward the ledge. Then he turned toward the other group on the water. Deidara turned, waving to his partner for a moment over his shoulder, and then made his way up to where the other Akatsuki members were lounging.

Sasuke's eyes narrowed. He thought to ask Kisame if that was usual for Sasori, but found when he turned his head that the shark nin had been waved over to joined Hidan and Kakuzu in their discussion of what did and did not imply one's consent to a wager. From the expression on the older shinobi's face, Sasuke assumed that he was not going to be able to disentangle himself from the conversation easily.

He returned his attention to the group on the hot spring when Deidara's head appeared on the ledge by Kakuzu's elbow. Sasori's back was turned toward the lounge, Tobi's mask was still in place, and the profile of Zetsu's flytrap-like leaves blocking off his profile, so that Sasuke could not tell which of the three was speaking. Zetsu's head turned slightly at one point, presumably to stare up at the argument taking place in the lounge that might have been carrying down to where they were standing, and then Tobi shrugged. A moment after that, Sasori's head bowed for a second before he turned and walked away, leaving the other two on the water's surface as he started up to where his peers were bickering.

In close range, the features that made Sasori seemed fake were not diminished. In the dim light, the paleness of his skin was made less noticeable, but the varnish-shimmer of the light still remained on his nose and the one cheek closest to the ledge's opening. His hair caught it too, lighting up the strands that might have been religiously cared for by a feudal lord's young daughter or maid. The lines on his arms could be seen as well, and even the individual joints of his fingers. A child might be able to position those fingers in any way she wanted, using them to create a fairytale figure or an imaginary friend. But then, when Sasori stood with close proximity, one's attention was drawn upward, to a pair of bright green eyes that were distinctly human.

And it was there, that Orochimaru's description was ruined.

Sasori's body made him more frightening that his comrades, regardless of whatever their physical forms may look like. It was that his body had been twisted and manipulated by its owner in so many ways, so that it was debatably a walking corpse. He was the one who stretched the physical definition of human farthest.

Sasori climbed over the counter a little farther down than his partner had. Deidara's head turned to him, but was gestured aside by his partner when invited to join the larger group. Instead the green eyes trailed idly over the room, to the gap in the wall to the white jar that Kisame had left behind, and then finally to Sasuke's face.

"Orochimaru."

Sasuke locked eyes with the former Suna nin for a second. A glance at Hidan over the smaller shinobi's shoulder warned him to remember who he was impersonating. "Good morning, Sasori-san."

The reflective lips twitched, momentarily suggesting that one corner of the puppet maker's mouth might be raised higher than the other in a half smile.

Sasuke waited. Unconsciously, he expected the varnish-dipped shinobi to say something to prolong their encounter, but the green eyes slid off him as Sasori leaned against the counter. He was farther down than Kisame had been, yet drew the Uchiha's attention more avidly than the shark had while sitting close enough for their body heat to radiate to one another. Sasori appeared not to notice. He turned his back to Sasuke and seemed to watch the argument that had dragged in his comrades.

"If you didn't mean to place a bet, then you shouldn't have said 'I bet—'"

"That wasn't what I meant, you heathen!"

Regardless of whatever may have happened to the appearance of his body, Sasuke thought as he watched the form of his master's former partner, the light reflecting off the back of his hair still looked normal. In ten years, Orochimaru had said, Sasori's hair had never changed. After the poisoning and preserving that Sasori's transformation had called for, his body was no longer capable of producing it. But a man who knew how to make a puppet from a corpse likewise knew how to make it appear alive. Sasori knew how to maintain his hair so that every scarlet strand was as vibrant as it was the day it stopped growing, over thirty-six years ago.

_"Sasori is more vain than he pretends,"_ Orochimaru had sneered.

"Orochimaru?"

Sasuke blinked. Sasori was looking at him over his shoulder pointedly, waiting.

"Did you say something, Sasori-san?"

"You're as attentive as ever, I see," there was note in the Sand ninja's voice, but Sasuke couldn't identify it as sarcasm or something else. "I was just saying that I meant to see you sooner. I was told that Kabuto was killed before you left."

"Hai," Sasuke said carefully. He knew about Sasori's connection to Orochimaru's favourite assistant. He also knew that it was very likely that Sasori had garnered other spies over the years. Not only would Sasori know what to look for in Orochimaru, but there was also a chance that he would know how to recognize Sasuke'sresponses as well. He smiled in a detached way and said, "It's a shame. Kabuto was always loyal when he recognized power."

The one eye that was clearly visible as Sasori watched him over his shoulder, narrowed for a moment. "And the Sound?" Sasori asked. "Uchiha Sasuke and Kabuto were your only clear candidates for successors. I didn't think you would consider leaving kage-dom behind you so easily."

Sasuke was silent. Even the Leader hadn't asked him about the Sound. But it was an obvious question for someone who had come back to an organization he left to start his own village. Orochimaru wouldn't have put himself in this situation. "I'm confident that if I left any tool of influence behind, you'll be the one to find out," Sasuke said. The sharp eyes were still trained to him, avidly drinking in all expression as he spoke.

Sasori wasn't put off. "I also wanted to ask you about your eyes. With your first two bodies, you managed to alter the irises to recreate your original eyes. Is there a reason why you don't have them now?" As he spoke, Sasori turned around so that he could face Sasuke normally.

Sasuke paused for only moment. "The Sharingan," he said, grasping the first idea that came to him. "Of course I couldn't risk manipulating the eyes on my new body. If it damaged the sharingan pupils, that would ruin the purpose, wouldn't it, Sasori-san?" He willed his smile to expand to a larger size, as if the question had amused him rather than set him on edge.

Sasori took a step closer to him. His mouth was raise slightly on one side again in the look that was not a smile but not far away from it. "And your tongue?"

Sasuke blinked.

Sasori went on, "I was never able to find out how you managed to recreate your tongue in your new bodies. I always assumed it was a bloodline ability, was I wrong?"

The Sand traitor was standing only a step away from him now. He was shorter than Sasuke, but his eyes were sharp and no less intimidating.

"Are you alright, Oro?" Sasuke saw his brother's partner look toward him over Sasori's shoulder.

Sasori stopped his approach and turned around, belatedly, to nod his head in greeting to the shark nin. "Hello, Kisame."

"Morning, Sasori."

For a moment, Sasuke thought that both ninja in front of him tensed, but couldn't be sure. Kisame's hand twitched at his side as if it were holding something that no else could see. But it passed, and a moment later Sasori swept around again and said pleasantly, "Orochimaru, perhaps you should try practicing with your new body?"

The abruptness of the question tempted Sasuke to gape. He resisted the urge. Behind the former Suna shinobi, he saw Kisame's eyes flicker toward him.

"I'd be happy to help you. I've wanted to see what you've learned since you left us for a while now."

"Sasori—" Kisame said sharply, but his comrade turned on him as if he had been waiting for the disapproving tone.

"If he's our comrade, we should know what he's capable of." Stress was laced into the words "comrade" and "capable," and Sasuke wondered if he were referencing back to a previous conversation that he had not been present for.

"He just came down here to see the match," Kisame said mulishly.

"The match is over now," Sasori countered, and more quietly went on with, "And even if it wasn't...he's no use to anyone if we just give him observation missions." Sasori's glanced over his shoulder as he said the last part, body still angled toward the object of their debate.

Sasuke knew that he should say something. Orochimaru would not have let himself be talked about as if he wasn't there. He watched Kisame's face over the red haired puppet master's shoulder. He knew that the shark nin's eyes were looking over the length of his arms and the width of his shoulders, measuring them in his mind against what he must expect from his smaller comrade. The question holding him back stuck in Sasuke mind and stopped his voice from speaking. _Had _Orochimaru sparred with his partner? No one in the Sound had been able to challenge his former mentor. At least, not enough to lure him into a casual match. But would Orochimaru have backed down if anyone could...?

"Not you." Kisame's voice cut into the silence that had sprung up while the former Suna shinobi held his gaze.

"Who?" Sasori said instantly. "Deidara can't fight him. He's already lost once today, he'll be useless in a second match."

"Not Hidan." Kisame's response came more easily than before.

"Of course not Hidan."

Neither shinobi looked at Sasuke as they bartered over the Akatsuki members, deciding on Sasuke's match in a way that was noticeably swifter than the Leader's method. Sasori turned around again. While Kisame seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact, Sasori's voice sounded unabashed in its clarity. Sasuke's eyes bored into the back of the puppet master's head during the final pause. It ended quickly when Kisame called out, "Tobi?"  
A second later, a distant "Hai?" could be heard from below the ledge, where Sasuke knew that both the Grass ninja and his pupil were still stationed on the surface of the hot spring.

"Are you up for another match?"

Sasori's head turned, and his flickered back toward Sasuke. He could see the raised lip, and finally recognized it as a smug expression on the shorter ninja's face. Orochimaru would snap at the red haired man, perhaps refuse to fight all together.

"Sure!"

But over Sasori's shoulder, there were three pairs of eyes, each turned discreetly in his direction as the other Akatsuki members pretended not to notice the challenge that their sinister comrade was laying out before their supposed returned one.

Kisame retook his seat from before, the white jar of whatever liquid already in his hand when Sasuke turned to go down onto the spring. Sasori went back to sit beside his partner in the space that was now filling up along the counter. There was no explanation or apology offered by the shark nin, but when Sasuke climbed over the counter next his brother's partner, he heard, almost as quiet as a whisper, "Don't look him in the eye."

kkkkkkkkkk

Sasuke had heard about Tobi from Orochimaru. His name had never been mentioned, but Orochimaru had referred to the masked ninja, first as "Zetsu's pupil" and then later as "the Leader's fool." He had been one of the last covered on Orochimaru's list of possible threats before the snake summoner's death.Tobi wasn't a member of the Akatsuki officially, Orochimaru had said, but he wanted to be. Whenever it was possible, he mentioned it. Tobi was near thirty. He still claimed to be Zetsu's student, but, Orochimaru had insisted, was close to the Grass nin's level the last time he saw them together. Given the time since then, Orochimaru was positive that Tobi had qualified to join the Akatsuki. He was a fool because he didn't realize that. He was a factor that the Leader took into consideration when assigning Zetsu missions, but so long as he w_as _the Grass shinobi's apprentice, he was bound to the organization as effectively as any of the members. But unlike a member, Orochimaru had pointed out snidely, as a scout he is expendable, and as Zetsu's student, he doesn't have a right to payment. Which is why, until the scout learns to press his request farther; the Leader will always turn him down when he requests to join the Akatsuki. Even when a place has been open for years.

Like with Sasori, Sasuke saw evidence that the snake summoner's assessment was not completely wrong. Tobi had been able to sneak up on him outside the Leader's office in near total darkness. He was capable of defeating a full-fledged member of the Akatsuki. He was even able to perform jutsu's outside of his sensei's area of expertise, and by Kisame's comment, did not need Zetsu's instruction to learn new ones.

By Sasuke's guess, all he needed was the cloak.

Orochimaru had failed to mention that Tobi was fast, though. That fact became known to Sasuke only after he had been called down to face off with the masked ninja that his former mentor had referred to as a "fool." He also found out that when Tobi had the upper hand, he had an irritating tendency to talk.

Sasuke also noticed something that had either changed or gone without mention by his former sensei: despite whatever he ignored about the Leader or his master's arrangement, Tobi was _arrogant._

"Your movement is different," Tobi had whispered to him when he dodged a hit that would have gotten him in the chest, and took a step closer so that he was standing near Sasuke's ear. He had his hand on Sasuke's elbow still from deterring the blow, but it was a light hold that Sasuke thought he could easily break. "It's been years since we've done this," Tobi went on as Sasuke wrenched his arm away. Tobi made no attempt to hold onto him, as was expected. "But can a new body really change one's style? You used to move more like this."

Without warning something rammed into Sasuke's ankle. He was in the process of lunging forward for another hit, but Tobi stepped to the side, letting him fall forward when his leg gave way. Then a fist swung into place just below his ribcage and pushed him back. Then something that felt like an elbow made contact with his head.

If he had been less experienced, he might have fallen back into the steaming water. As it was, he came back to himself in time to throw down his hand and flip himself over as if he were trying to perform a cartwheel and land on his feet a few steps back from his opponent, the side of his head and the palm of his hand throbbing in unison.

Tobi's posture seemed to brighten. His voice was pleasant when he dropped into a defensive position and said, "Orochimaru was always talented, but his skills in hand to hand combat were lacking. He used summoning jutsu's to wear an opponent down before attacking them himself." Even while he spoke, Sasuke could see his stance change, relaxing. "When attacking on his own, Orochimaru didn't waste energy on useless movement; he tried to cause the most damage possible with the least amount of effort."

A moment later his stance dropped completely, as if he had just thought better of what he had been planning to do. Sasuke thought about making an attack, but before he could do so, he saw black and orange spirals in front of him. Orange. Before, Tobi's spirals had been white. He must have had a spare mask.

Sasuke took a step back, braced himself, and blocked the kunai coming at him with one of his own. Behind Tobi, he could see the smooth surface of the water. Where Tobi had previously been standing, he saw no ripples or other evidence of sudden movement, and Sasuke wondered briefly if there had been anything standing there at all.

"You're not using it," Tobi said over their locked kunai.

Sasuke returned his attention to his opponent. "Not using what, Tobi-kun?" To Orochimaru, the honorific "kun" was reserved for people who either intrigued the snake sannin, or annoyed him.

Sasuke took another step back while he spoke, angling his weapon in a certain way that his old master had shown him and drawing a small circle with the tip that would make his opponent choose between dropping his own weapon, or allowing his hand to be cut open.

A solid plunking sound from the water between them indicated that Tobi had made the expected choice.

"The Sharingan," Tobi said.

Without warning, Sasuke's vision wobbled. The black water around him merged together with the stone as if images were being sucked into a hole that he couldn't see. Tobi, who had been standing in front of him when the colours began to twist together, vanished as the new scenery took form. Seeming to come from all around him at once, Sasuke heard, "I'm curious."

Sasuke wasn't fazed for a moment. Apparently, his old sensei had also forgotten to mention that Zetsu's apprentice was skilled in genjutsu. Sasuke tried to think back for a moment to pinpoint when the illusion could have been done. He hadn't seen Tobi form any seals...

Something made a quiet squealing sound as it came at him from behind, and Sasuke quickly turned, already in mid jump to let the shuriken fly under him.

The false setting that Tobi had made with his jutsu was total blackness. Dark shapes darted through shadowy areas to confuse him as to which way to attack, some taking on forms that seemed similar to human, but obscure enough to keep him from knowing for certain. Sasuke activated his Sharingan, as Tobi had requested, immediately piercing through the false world that the other ninja had created.

There was a moment before Tobi realized that his jutsu was now ineffective, but it was only a moment. When Sasuke came at him with another kunai drawn, the Grass ninja's pupil spun in time to catch him, the side of the kunai clashing against the retracted blades of another shuriken.

"I see you have mastered it," Tobi said as he held the kunai off. "Congratulations."

Sasuke took a step closer to the other ninja, and felt his arm shake with a momentary warning that informed him speed and genjutsu abilities set aside, the other missing nin had the upper hand when it came to physical strength.

Tobi didn't miss it. "The head family of the Uchiha clan," he said through his orange and black mask, "was known for precision and cunning. For a member of the main family, the muscle mass of one's body can only be average at best by shinobi standards." Tobi nodded toward Sasuke's arm, open for observations without the Akatsuki cloak, and Sasuke glared. Tobi went on to add, "It is one of the reasons why Uchiha Itachi was partnered with Hoshigaki Kisame."

Sasuke didn't respond verbally, but he locked his eyes on the one hole in Tobi's mask, forgetting Kisame's warning to avoid doing just that. His free hand lower down was reaching out discreetly around the other nin's waist, touching down feather-lightly on Tobi's weapon pouch. While he listened to Tobi's assessment of his family's shortcomings, he worked his fingers under the pouch's flap without snapping the button, which might have been heard or felt by the masked scout. There was a chance that Tobi might feel the warmth of his outstretched arm, just a hair's width away from brushing his side, or feel the miniscule weight shifting as he wrapped his fingers around one smooth, tiny object inside the pouch.

Sasuke didn't know which possibility gave him away when his opponent suddenly jerked back, nearly pushing him into the steaming water while he did so. Sasuke held onto his prize as he executed the same flip to keep himself from landing on his back in the water, dropping his kunai and throwing his hand down to mold chakra.

Tobi was standing on a rock pile when he looked up again. Several ripples across the water's surface told Sasuke that when he was hastily pushed away, a few other objects had also flown free of the other man's pouch and landed irrevocably in the spring. Tobi's posture was almost a crouch; annoyed at least, bordering on angry.

He looked down at what he had been able to take from the other shinobi's supplies before he slipped it into his pocket. He hadn't thought to arm himself with anything more than the most basic of shinobi appliances that morning when he went out to burn Orochimaru's box. It was a smoke bomb. Sasuke tried to think of some way that he could use it to shift the match, but a moment after storing it, a burning pain erupted in his ankle as something wrapped around it and pulled him down. Sasuke's leg went down into the spring up to his knee before he remembered to throw both chakra and his weight into his other to keep himself from submerging completely.

Across from him, Tobi watched silently from his pile of rocks, and Sasuke knew only because of his bloodline ability that Tobi was really there. A clone was holding him then, just as one had held Deidara before.

Sasuke again couldn't remember when Tobi had formed the seals to make a clone. It could have been before he activated his Sharingan during the genjutsu, or during his momentary distraction to keep from falling into the water when Tobi had pushed him away.

Digging into his weapons holster, thankfully strapped to the leg that was not in danger of being dragged down by a shadowy clone of his opponent, Sasuke found another kunai. Bracing himself against the heat, he stabbed into the water, aiming toward the fingers clinging to his leg. Tobi appeared to simply stay crouched on his rock a short distance away, watching him through the one darkened eyehole of his mask.

When Sasuke stood up again, it was because the clone had let him go and sunk back into the blackness below. He wondered if this was why Tobi had learned to ignore the heat and fight with his jacket on, so that when he used a clone against Deidara the light wouldn't reflect off of his bare arms beneath the surface. The toes peeking out from under the straps of Sasuke's sandals were a deep, tortured pink when he glanced down at them, and when he set his leg tentatively back on the spring surface it trembled with the effort to mold chakra. Also with the clone still lurking beneath him, Sasuke knew right away that staying on the spring surface was not an option. He needed to get onto the walls.

Looking at Tobi, Sasuke felt something trigger in his shoulder like an old itch. It had been a long time since he felt it come alive without meaning for it, but he put aside.

_"Self-control, Sasuke-kun," _Orochimaru's scolding hiss echoed from within his memory.

Tobi was still able to deflect his attacks effortlessly when Sasuke charged at him, even with his Sharingan activated to tell him which way the scout would dodge or hit. Sasuke became aware of another feature Tobi had that Orochimaru had not bothered to mention: he was flexible. Tobi bent his body back into a perfect right angle when Sasuke tried to land a punch directly in the middle of his chest, and let the Uchiha's fist soar over his torso before reaching up to grab it at the wrist. His fingers, gloved and larger than Sasuke's, closed around it easily before the Sharingan user could pull it back. "Now, Itachi-san," Tobi said quietly as his fingers flexed, changing their positions by mere fractions, "he moved more like this."

Sasuke barely had time to glare down at the mention of his brother's name before his arm was jerked forward so that his upper body stretched over the masked shinobi's. A knee rammed viciously into his gut to shatter his balance, and he pushed him to the side because of how it was angled. Tobi snapped upright within a second and fisted his hand in the back of Sasuke's hair to pull him back from the spring water. He felt jagged edges dig into his back as the hand dropped down to his shirt collar and pushed him back into what he realized was the rock pile Tobi had been standing on minutes ago. Another hand settled on his throat.

Impulsively, Sasuke tried to pry them away.

"In addition to a low muscle mass," Tobi said as his mask hovered above Sasuke's face, "Itachi's also had an exceptional amount of chakra. Very few of his moves can be completed in succession with one another without draining him entirely, which is why he developed precise movement and high speed techniques to wear his opponents down. Another reason why he was partnered with Hoshigaki Kisame." Tobi released his fingers and moved back so that the water rose up around him from the velocity. "Shall I imitate anyone else, Orochimaru-san?"

Sasuke pushed himself away from the rocks, eyes narrowed as he glared at Zetsu's apprentice. His shoulder throbbed dangerously. Tobi was playing with him.

_"Nothing I teach you will be any help to you unless you exercise some form of control over yourself, Sasuke-kun."_

Tobi was in a defensive position again, and watching Sasuke from the section of the spring that was farthest away from the piles of broken stone that Deidara had likely blasted from the ceiling over the years. Sasuke knew what he was doing; Tobi wanted to lure him into open water again, where he would have the advantage.

Sasuke glanced at the stone walling around him. There were places where the walls were cracked, possibly from the ritual fights of Zetsu's over-zealous student and Sasori's eccentric partner, but no jagged edges reached out that he could hook wire around to set a trap. If he had had wire. There were the piles of rocks that rose out of the water at different heights, but he was doubtful about how many of them were firmly built enough to hold him if he attempted to use them to stay out of the water for the rest of the match. Fire jutsu was ruled out automatically given the location.

Briefly, Sasuke tried to find the lounge in the stone above his head but couldn't because of his perspective. Instead he saw only stone stretching up toward the ceiling, which was also only a safe location if Tobi decided not to perform his dragon jutsu again. Still, Sasuke flipped himself over onto the rocks behind him. Tobi's arms lowered partially in confusion.

Reaching into his pocket, Sasuke withdrew the tiny smoke bomb he stole earlier and threw it down onto the stone at his feet. Immediately afterward, the air over the spring darkened with thick gray smoke.

Jumping from one rock pile to the next, Sasuke made his way back toward the wall under the shielding screen. He heard movement distantly on the water, and with his Sharingan still in affect, saw ripples racing through the water below him. As he stepped onto the wall, he began performing a series of seals as he ran up toward the ceiling to get a better perspective of the battlegrounds.

"Did you forget, Orochimaru-san? Smoke doesn't work on me."

Sasuke paused for only a split second when he heard the voice coming from the side. He turned his head to peer through the smoke, dyed a purplish-red to him, and saw Tobi standing there. At first, Sasuke stared because something in the back of his mind told him that there was something distinctly wrong with the image before realization came to him. Sasuke couldn't sense Tobi's chakra, though that was likely because the other ninja was shielding it, but also, Sasuke couldn't _see_ it either.

It was another moment before he noticed Tobi's position. Which foot he had in front on him, how his other leg was tensed as if it had been in mid-step a moment ago. And then another before he looked at the other man's hands, and what seal they were holding.

"I didn't know you learned this jutsu," Tobi said easily through his mask. His hands parted, and then finally Sasuke was able to see his opponent's chakra, but before that, he heard the familiar sound of chirping birds.

Dropping his own seal, Sasuke shook himself just in time to remember how to dodge. Changing direction, Sasuke ran back down toward the water, knowing that Tobi wouldn't be able to perform another jutsu so long as the chidori kept his hand occupied. The sound of Kakashi's signature jutsu assured him that he was followed.

The smoke bomb should have worn off by now, Sasuke knew, but given the closed walls of the cavern, the smoke could only thin itself as it reached toward the ceiling and possibly into the tunnels. It was barely a fog when Sasuke stood at the edge of the hot spring again. Even without his enhanced vision, he would have been able to see the glow cutting through the murky air as Tobi approached. His shoulder twitched imploringly as he watched the brightness grow larger.

When Tobi was in front of him, he seemed surprised, though Sasuke couldn't be sure whether that was because his hand was caught and clenched until the crackling of the chidori died off, or because of the black-petal markings that were spreading over his skin as he was caught. Muscles went lax under Sasuke's fingers, and then suddenly began to strain as pain overrode alarm.

"What..." Tobi started to say, but Sasuke increased his grip and the scout lost his sentence in time with the delicates snaps that Sasuke felt in his wrist.

Tobi's other hand immediately shot out to pry Sasuke's fingers from him. His hand was freed a moment later when Sasuke let him go of it on own, and watched Tobi stumble back. It was only a few steps at first, the scout keeping his head turned toward him. But when Sasuke took his first stride forward, the other man turned and ran upward.

Sasuke wasn't sure whether Tobi ran because he was able to sense the stark change in his chakra, or whether it was on the chance that he might have seen the pattern of the cursed seal sometime before Orochimaru had left the organization. Watching him, Sasuke only followed as the masked scout raced upward, away from the smoke that hadn't been able to hide either of them, going toward the ceiling.

A sound that was either based on distress or surprised came from Tobi's throat when Sasuke ran up beside him. He grinned at him for a moment after the masked head turned, then picked up his speed a bit more before he rammed into the scout. The larger body sprawled out on the side of the wall, head pointed down toward the water, but still managing to keep himself from falling by practiced adaptability with the moulding of his chakra that had likely been the product of his spars with Deidara.

Still high from the surge of strength that the seal provided when used for the first time after a long break, Sasuke straddled him. With one hand, he lightly gripped the scout's throat in the same way that Tobi had done to him only a few minutes earlier. One of his hands was still sore from stabbing into the water with his kunai when Tobi's clone had tried to drag him under. He let that hand throw the first punch, perfectly centered where the nose would be under Tobi's mask. He heard the cry of pain, felt the crunch under his knuckles and the protective plastic, and then a second later, the answering blow to his jaw from the other shinobi's one remaining good hand.

Sasuke tightened his grip on Tobi's throat, expecting the other to jump to try and relieve it. With his free hand, Sasuke executed another hit, in the same place as before. Another sound came out from under the mask, muffled and strangled in a way that suggested his opponent had tried to keep it from being made. At the same time, Sasuke felt the sudden pull of gravity as Tobi's chakra control slipped for a second, long enough to send his body skidding down the rough stone wall, and Sasuke with him as he held his place atop the other ninja. The passing air whipped Sasuke's bangs away from his face as they went, the steam becoming thicker as the water seem to rise up to meet them.

Sasuke had his fist poised in the air above Tobi's head, ready to throw one last hit before the water came too close and he had to jump away to avoid splashing into it with the other shinobi. His body tensed, waiting for that moment as he leaned over the spiral mask. He could feel the steam moistening his skin and hair. He knew it would have to be soon.

Sasuke began to execute the finishing move, tightening his grip further on the other man's throat...

...But then stopped cold with his eyes locked on the single hole in his opponent's mask. The fist that Sasuke had been meaning to throw stilled and became lax as he stared down at what he clearly saw as a scarlet red eye staring blindly up at him. His hesitation didn't go unnoticed. A moment later, Tobi's pupils refocused, taking in Sasuke's expression, and then, even as the air flew by them Sasuke felt the muscles in the masked ninja's neck tense against his hand.

A moment later, something solid made contact with the side of Sasuke's head and knocked him to the side. Before he could fall into the smouldering water, he was grabbed roughly by the shoulder and jerked around so that he stood upright with his feet only barely brushing against the water's surface. He heard but did not see the splash as Tobi hit, and the sharp hiss that followed it.

A white object cut the air in front of him when Sasuke lifted his head. Whatever it was repeated the movement again a second later, and then again. Several times. Straight, fluid up and down movements that started near his head and went down to his feet. Warm, misty air fanned his face with every stroke. Sasuke watched it mutely for a minute before he thought to struggle against what he discovered where hands firmly holding him in place, but found that his arms were mysteriously heavier than before.

When the curious heaviness extended to his head, Sasuke's vision drooped downward, so that he was able to see the black fabric of his brother's tank top on his chest. Then his eyes landed on his arm, and the retreating black-petal design of the cursed seal as his chakra supply faded.

_"Honestly, Sasuke-kun, you're worse than the Sound Five."_

"Has he returned to normal?" A voice came from above Sasuke's head. Looking up, his eyes took in deep green, and then black and white as his captor's head turned down to him.

_"Zetsu. Dreamy, thoughtful. Attack at a distance. He might be hungry."_

"Yeah," a voice that Sasuke recognized answered, "You can let him go now, he's fine."

The pressure on Sasuke's arms eased, but Zetsu didn't release him. Kisame, standing in front of them with his massive sword drawn, didn't say anything. His head was turned to look over his shoulder to where Deidara was hefting Tobi's body out of the water.

Slightly off balance because of the differences in their size and weights, Deidara took a moment adjusting the amount of chakra he sent into his feet as he propped the scout's body against his own and held him upright. Sasori stood to one side until his partner nodded to him over Tobi's shoulder.

"Can you hear me?" Sasori said in a clear voice as he approached his comrade's battered student.

Tobi nodded, clothes dripping both into the spring and onto the sulking blond holding him. Sasuke was confused by the caution for a moment before he noticed the red trails escaping from under the black and orange mask that he had managed not to see during their fight.

Sasori didn't acknowledge the younger shinobi's response. When he stood in front of him, he reached out without unceremoniously and lifted the bottom of Tobi's jacket and let his hands delve underneath.

"One broken rib," Sasori said, seemingly to the air, as he felt along the scout's torso. Tobi was silent while the puppet maker groped for injuries under his shirt, though when the former Sand nin's hand passed over the oddish lump that was apparently the rib in question, Sasuke was sure that he saw a suppressed wince in the way the other ninja jerked his head. Sasuke must have caused it when he straddled him. It was hard to maintain a control over the force used after the cursed seal was activated.

Sasori withdrew his hands a minute later and tugged the jacket back into place. Next he took hold of Tobi's chin. With one glossy hand he stretched back the edge of the scout's mask without removing it and slid his other underneath. When he pulled his hand back, Sasori's palm was red. "Broken nose," he said again to the air, with the same flat voice. Then as he began to whip the blood away from his hand, he turned his head in Sasuke's direction. "He's fine."

Sasuke frowned for a moment before he felt the hands on him disappear and realized that Sasori had been speaking to Zetsu.

Zetsu stepped around Sasuke without a word and went to collect his charge from Deidara, who after his partner turned away, might have dropped him back into the spring.

Sasori's piercing eyes finally dropped to Sasuke, during pause after the Grass ninja had turned to leave and before he told Deidara that they had a mission briefing in one hour. Sasuke thought he saw the corner of him mouth perk upward one more time before the red haired puppet master turned away.

"Come on, we better get you cleaned up before Leader-sama hears about this."

Sasuke turned to see Kisame refastening his sword to the strap his wore around his shoulder at all times. He realized that the white object he had seen fanning him before had been the Samehade. That explained the sudden loss of his chakra.

Kisame began to walk away, following the others toward the wall that probably led up to the ledge. He absently watched the white bandages around the shark nin's sword for a few seconds, after a tremor in his leg warned him that between the cursed seal and the Samehade, his chakra supply could not support him on the spring surface for long. But before he reached the wall, his eyes strayed to the back of the radiant red hair that was laboriously maintained by his sensei's former partner. Inwardly he wondered if the fight with Tobi had been planned; thought up on a moment's notice by the puppet maker who had been so grudgingly engraved into Orochimaru's memory.

Probably.

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A/N:

Updated! It's been updated! ((cue big smiles)) I'm very sorry that this story's second chapter got put off for so long. Please believe me when I say that this story has been haunting the back of my mind for three times pre-week since the first chapter was posted. Thank you to everyone who reviewed it. :) I really didn't expect to get as many responses as I ended up getting.

But I've been advised to mention a few things about this story (one being that even though the tape Sasuke found is gone, MORE KISAITA IS TO COME! You'll just never find out how that lemon with Itachi on Kisame's lap started, heh). The first thing shouldn't be that surprising. I think I made it as clear as possible without having Sasuke whip Tobi's mask off that I'm supporting the Tobi-IS-Obito theory in this story (I'm sorry if anyone who doesn't agree with that possibility reads this, I couldn't resist!). The next is that this chapter might seem a little bit off. Usually, the entire chapter wont be made up just by following Sasuke around through his morning. This installment wasn't even in the rough draft of the story. It just sort of happened during one of those days when the story popped up and claimed my attention. The last order of business is to apologize for taking up so much ranting room. Now to respond to the lovely reviews I got:)

**K-chan** I wonder what he was _doing_ with it, indeed...((giggle)) As for how it was made, well, I'm certain that it had something to do with being very, very sneaky. Orochimaru has some really strange hobbies. O.o But so long as contemplating those hobbies keeps you from getting bored with my story, go for it:D I'm glad that liked it so much.

**False-Image **((snicker)) Well, you got to have expected SOMETHING perverted to be in one of those boxes. Sasuke was just lucky enough to find it on the first try. And come his first vacation from the akatsuki, I'm sure that he will be signing up for so much needed therapy. Poor Sasuke. ((pats the boy's head as he twitches and mumbles about cruel, cruel weasels attacking his sanity form beyond the grave))

**Angelus Eros Weiss **"Another Kodak scene." I'm sure that's exactly what Orochimaru was thinking when he video taped it (though reading that put this image in my head of Oro using photoshop to put little Santa hats on Kisame and Itachi and a bit of holly to cover things, and using the image for his Christmas cards. lol. And that's why Orochimaru had to flee the akatsuki!)

**Popberry Bluetart **Glad you liked it! ((is also a huge fan of KisaIta)) I hope this chapter was enjoyable, even if it lacked shark/weesil goodness...

**Sess-GalX50 **Heh, I used to print fanfictions out to read at the gym. But you didn't need to know that. Hope you enjoyed the chapter.

**XxHunter The One and OnlyxX **(I think you get the prize for longest name that I've had to type tonight) It's been updated! Now, stop calling my rear end names!

**Lady Jeclayn **You were one of my first reviewers for this story (and one of the last ones before I updated). Thanks, I really enjoyed getting both (particularly the first one, I'm always nervous the day after I post something). Sorry about the wait, but in your second review, you had nothing to worry about. I never intended to discontinue this story, I'm just lazy. :P I hope that you enjoyed this chapter too.

**Angsty Freedom Fighter **If you're not into Sasuke, I can understand that this particular chapter might have been a bit boring since it mainly deals with his interaction with the akatsuki members, and displaying just howunconvincing of an actor he is (I'm sure that _Itachi_ would be able to do a flawless Orochimaru impression!). All the same, I hope you liked it, and I promise you that there will definitely be much more Itachi in the next chapter. Much more. ((evil laugh))

**Saiseki **(I like your username) lol, yes, it is indeed a smex tape! Though, I doubt that Itachi and Kisame were aware that it was being filmed. I don't know about you, but if a coworker came up to me and asked if he could video tape me and my boyfriend doing...things...I would be uncomfortable. Thanks for the review:D It's always good to know somebody likes what I do.

**Anime-Dudette **I have! I updated! Though Sasuke's a little less IC in this chapter. Glad that you liked the last one though. It was fun to write. ;)

**Redcloudangel **Hm. I'm personally not as big on ItaSasu as I once was. If you squint, you might be able to see some of that here and there (I mean, Sasuke _is_ still thinking about the tape). I'm glad that you find the chapter believable though, even with Itachi out of the picture (which I'm sure would have been more monumental in the actual Naruto story :)).

**Pysche **:P Not much KisaIta moments in this chapter, though once they're ready to be posted you'll be the first one to see them! (and laugh at my mistakesif my fingers type something like "lord" instead of "lube" XD).

**desolate butterfly **I hooked a reader who wasn't even out for KisaIta? WOO! It's an honor to read your praises. Though in this chapter, I think that Sasuke is a bit out of character.

**Pyrekins **I'm glad you like it. :) KisaIta has been one of my favorite pairings for a long time too. I'm only sorry that there isn't more fan arts and fictions available on them.

**Nekotsume **Not too much of the akatsuki details are being made up so far. It's already been said that they're based in the River Country, and all the characters I've been using so far are already known in the manga. Most of what I'm guessing with are the little details about how the Sound Village works, and how the base's interior looks like. It's a relief to know that it's all coming off as believable, though. :)

**Londondaime **:P You know he would have something dirty in his room. Why do you think he was so afraid of Itachi? He and Kisame found the camera!

**Azamiko **I certainlyhope that you mean "SOMETHING" in a good way. You're right that there is no obvious reason that Sasuke has to stay with the akatsuki, but that's there for a reason. I'm trying to hint that at this point in the story, he's confused about what he's supposed to do now, and maybe subconsciously, clinging to the years-old drive to learn about his older brother. ((shrug)) I might have missed it, but either way...I'm afraid that Sasuke's going to be staying with the akatsuki for the rest of the story.


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